George Crumb: 70th Birthday Album - Star Child; Mundus Canis; Three Early Songs

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About George Crumb: 70th Birthday Album - Star

Product Description Three works by George Crumb, the American master composer. Star-Child, the 2001 Grammy Winner for Best Contemporary Composition. This work was considered "unrecordable" by Boulez as it calls for multiple orchestras to perform simultaneously with different conductors. Through digital technology, Bridge has provided the first studio recording of this work ever. Thomas Conlin leads the Warsaw Philharmonic to extraordinary heights in Crumb's apocalyptic masterpiece. Mundus Canis (A Dog's World)is a series of short works for guitar and percussion. David Starobin and George Crumb play these 5 works, based on the Crumb family dogs. Crumb and Starobin have since taken this piece on the road for a series of performances both across the USA and around the world. George Crumb calls his Three Early Songs "the sins of his youth. These songs are certainly far from sinful, though stylistically far different from his later work. Crumb performs them on the piano, while his daughter, Ann Crumb, sings the vocal parts. Amazon.com Bridge celebrates George Crumb's 70th birthday with a cross-section of his music, including youthful songs and a delightfully humorous depiction of the dogs in his life for David Starobin's expressive guitar and Crumb's percussion accompaniment. The centerpiece though, is the large-scale Star-Child, a 1977 commission from Pierre Boulez and the New York Philharmonic. Massive in ambition and in its expansive aural vistas, Crumb says it traces a "progression from darkness (despair) to light (or joy and spiritual realization)." Have no fears of New Age doodling; Crumb's music is tough, beginning with a quiet, dark slow movement that becomes an expressive duet for soprano, and a trombone that comments on the "Libera me" text with stentorian eruptions, muted sighs, and spoken parody of the soprano line. The central movement depicts the Apocalypse; the closing movement brings peace via luminous strings surrounded by a halo of handbells and a male chorus's hushed prayer of deliverance. An important work; an important disc. --Dan Davis Review "This miraculous disc represents a dream for music lovers who are captivated by Crumb's haunting, evocative, and passionate musical soundscapes." -- ClassicsToday.com About the Artist George Crumb was born in Charleston, West Virginia in 1929. Crumb has been the recipient of numerous honors, including the 1968 Pulitzer Prize, the 1971 UNESCO Award, and Fromm, Guggenheim, Koussevitsky and Rockefeller Foundation awards. In 1995, Mr. Crumb became the 36th recipient of the MacDowell Medal, an award named in honor of the American composer and awarded to a composer who has made an outstanding contribution to the nation's culture. Attributes of George Crumb's music which are frequently cited include the composer's extraordinarily sensitive era for refined timbral nuance, his powerful evocative sense, and a sureness and conciseness in realizing his musical intentions. Thomas Conlin has conducted extensively on five continents, with opera and ballet companies as well as with major orchestras in Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Columbia, Egypt, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Norway, Poland, Russia, Spain and Turkey and throughout the United States. Thomas Conlin has commissioned and premiered numerous new works, and his concerts frequently feature compositions by American composers. Soprano Susan Narucki has been described by the San Francisco Chronicle as "a composer's best friend - a new music interpreter of such intelligence, commitment and technical prowess that anything she sings takes on a radiant light." In recent seasons she has appeared as soloist with the New York Philharmonic, the LA Philharmonic, the New World Symphony and many others. Guitarist David Starobin's performances have earned the native New Yorker prominence in the world of classical music. Starobin is the only guitarist to have been awarded Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Career Pri