Page 512 - Liverpool Philharmonic 22-23 Season Coverage Book

Shortly after George Crumb’s death in early 2022 the tape of a concert of his music in the
Netherlands in 1978 was discovered, and has now been re-released having been re-mastered by
the brilliant audio engineer John Croft. It features one of Crumb’s hits of the 70s, Vox
Balaenae (“The Voice of the Whale”) alongside Dream Sequence and the Cello Sonata, the latter
two both new to me. Crumb was part of the avant-garde movement in the 1960s and 1970s that
rejected Romanticism, instead casting his ears into the wider worlds of Japanese, Indian and
native Australian music. There is also, in Dream Sequence, a nod to electronics, although the
spooky drone is provided by glass harmonica, rather than a machine. There is a gently
nightmarish quality to the improvisational, always quiet, gestures from the violin, cello and piano,
which float in and out of focus. I would love to hear it live, but through headphones the recording
gives something of the delicacy and fragility of the sound.

Vox Balaenae, for flute, cello and piano, was a product of the unlikely hit record of 1970 Songs of
the Humpback Whale, the first time that whale-song had been properly heard by humans. Crumb
works through a series of variations, each depicting a geological era. There are innovations like
requiring the flautist to sing through the instrument, the cellist to whistle and the pianist to play
within the body of the instrument. But the music’s impact goes beyond gimmickry: it is Crumb’s
sculpting of the sound and placing of sound events that gives it a rhetorical weight. And when the
music finally opens out into a full-blooded melody in the final “Sea-Nocturne” there is a yearning
quality I find irresistible. This record, a time-capsule from the 1970s, still speaks to us
today. Bernard Hughes