Total Immersion: Crumb

3 / 5 stars
Barbican, London

The first of this season's BBC composer days at the Barbican was devoted to the American George Crumb. It was a timely retrospective. Crumb is 80 this year, and his music, once a staple of new-music programmes on both sides of the Atlantic, is now hardly ever heard in the UK; what seemed destined to become repertory works have slipped gently into obscurity. But a lunchtime concert by the Guildhall New Music Ensemble did include Crumb's unarguably enduring achievement, the Lorca song-cycle Ancient Voices of Children from 1970, leaving the BBC Symphony's evening programme, conducted by Martyn Brabbins, to concentrate on his less familiar orchestral works.

The "four processionals for orchestra" Echoes of Time and the River, from 1967, won Crumb a Pulitzer prize and put him on the map as a composer whose fascination with exotic sounds and theatrical elements chimed with the prevailing aesthetic of the time. Yet now, as groups of BBCSO players trudged dutifully around the platform, it seemed dated and musically anorexic.

The other pieces that Brabbins conducted have aged rather better. The 1984 A Haunted Landscape does what Crumb has always done best, colours a broad musical canvas with inventive sounds, while 1977's Star-Child remains his most ambitious work. It's a requiem of sorts, scored for a massive orchestra with four conductors, male speaking chorus (here, the New London Chamber Choir here) also playing handbells, boys' choir (Trinity Boys), solo soprano (Claudia Barainsky) and trombone (Helen Vollam). The few climaxes are predictably massive, and the general effects are pleasant enough even if, like so much of Crumb's music, they are fundamentally soft-centred.