![]() The paintings span more than a century, from James McNeill Whistler’s Nocturne: Blue And Gold (1872) to Simon Dinnerstein’s Purple Haze (1991), with Paul Klee receiving the most attention with four paintings, two of which lead off each of the Books.įor me, Debussy’s Preludes also come to mind, particularly since a pianist can make use of the often-ignored sostenuto pedal (the middle one) to achieve the composers’ effects. ![]() It’s easy to call this stroll through the gallery a 21st-century Pictures at an Exhibition, for like Mussorgsky, Crumb used these paintings as launching pads to enter his own sonic universe. With Metamorphoses, a cycle of Crumb’s impressions of a collection of 20 “celebrated” paintings by 14 artists, he came full circle half a lifetime later. He had already composed a magnum opus for the subtly amplified piano in the form of four books of Makrokosmos - an undisguised tip of the hat to Bartók’s epic Mikrokosmos - in the 1970s. ![]() He valued color above all, and he extracted every ounce of color from the piano in the service of his dark, strange, sustained soundscapes, using unorthodox techniques - some borrowed, some invented - to exploit the possibilities of the pedals and the piano strings. Crumb had a conception of sound that stood apart from the trends and orthodoxies that ruled over his long lifetime.
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