COMPLETE CRUMB EDITION VOL. 21
BRIDGE 9592

Bridge Records is pleased to release Volume 21 of its Complete Crumb Edition, a recording project begun in 1982, and completed 42 years later with this final installment. The Crumb Edition documents the late American composer's complete catalog of works, spanning Crumb's seventy-five year compositional career.  Vol. 21 includes compositions from the beginning, middle, and end of Crumb’s long and distinguished career, and features the world premiere recording of the composer's penultimate composition, the percussion quintet Kronos-Kryptos (Time-Secret).  Volume 21 also includes Crumb's second acknowledged composition, the Sonata for Solo Violoncello (1955), performed by cellist Timothy Eddy, as well as two performances of Crumb's piano solo, Processional (1983), played by pianists Gilbert Kalish (keyboard version) and Marcantonio Barone (alternate version with "extended piano" effects).

Reviews:

Listening Through the Life of George Crumb - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Bridge's Complete Crumb Edition has been awarded numerous international awards including the Cannes International Critics Award, two Grammy nominations, and a Grammy Award for Crumb's largest work, Star-Child. Critic David Hurwitz wrote that "Bridge’s decision to embark on a complete edition of George Crumb’s music remains one of the most significant recording projects currently in progress, as well as one of the most artistically successful." — ClassicsToday.com

"Bridge has fulfilled its plan for a Complete Edition devoted to George Crumb. Volume 21 duly reflects this with its trilogy of early, middle and late works that features successive generations of the composer’s advocates....the Solo Cello Sonata (1955) has long been central to its medium. Timothy Eddy confirms why with the impulsiveness of its initial Fantasia, the quixotic elegance of its central ‘Tema pastoral con variazioni’ and the unbridled virtuosity of its closing Toccata. From here to Crumb’s penultimate work is to be reminded of the consistency in his output’s evolution, Kronos-Kryptos (2020) renewing his love for percussion in the evocative tintinnabulary of ‘Easter Dawning’, the dextrous aqua-line imagery of ‘A Ghostly Barcarolle’ then visceral onslaught in ‘Drummers of the Apocalypse’. Revised after his daughter’s death, ‘Appalachian Echoes’ conflates the intimate and the transcendent with an affecting eloquence.  Framing these are two versions of the piano piece Processional (1983). The former is played by its dedicatee, Gilbert Kalish, with typical dynamism and panache; the latter by Marcantonio Barone with greater fleetness and a recourse to ‘extended piano effects’, which impart a more distanced if no less tangible atmosphere to music that is hieratic in the most involving sense...no one with even passing interest in Crumb should be without the present release – which, with its spaciously immediate sound and detailed notes by Crumb authority Steven Bruns, fittingly rounds off this journey through a life."  —Gramophone, April 2024

BRIDGE 9592