George Crumb, Black Angels (13 Images from the Dark Land) for Electric String Quartet (New York String Quartet; CRI, $5.95). The avant-garde LP of the year. In 1968, as a virtual unknown of 39, Crumb won the Pulitzer Prize in music for his orchestral suite Echoes of Time and the River. In the years since, he has been winning something perhaps even more important—a reputation as one of the major innovators of American music. One hallmark of the Crumb style is his fondness for programmatic schemes that can be startling and bizarre, but usually display his uncanny knack for drawing unfamiliar sounds from familiar instruments. "A kind of parable on our troubled world," to quote the composer, Black Angels uses the surrealistic screech of amplified strings to call forth the grim world of night insects in a way the listener is not likely soon to forget. Elsewhere, the players trill with thimble-capped fingers, bow crystal glasses tuned with water, even play maracas and tam-tams. What others might have left at the level of mere gimmickry, Crumb has turned into a chilling evocation of medieval damnation and redemption. Not for easy listening, though.
Songs by Stephen Foster (Mezzo-Soprano Jan DeGaetani, Baritone Leslie Guinn, Pianist Gilbert Kalish; Nonesuch, $2.98). One of the prime movers in the Scott Joplin revival, Nonesuch now appears to be trying the same trick for the composer of Old Black Joe and Old Folks at Home. The company deserves to succeed. Foster (1826-64) was America's first great songwriter, and there is much more in his song bag than just the minstrel ballads with Uncle Tomish lyrics by which he is usually remembered. There is, for example, the sprightly If You've Only Got a Moustache, which could have been written by Schubert. Also Wilt Thou Be Gone, Love?, an Italianate duet for Romeo and Juliet. And many more, including, of course, Beautiful Dreamer and Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair. Adding to the joy of the album are the authentic accompaniments, played on an 1850 Chickering piano, melodeon, keyed bugle and other instruments at Washington's Smithsonian Institution.
The Art of Joseph Szigeti (Columbia, 6 LPs, $23.98). Now 80 and living in Switzerland, Szigeti at his peak was that rare performer fully entitled to be called both a musicians' musician and a violinists' violinist. With Szigeti, the usual egoistic trappings of the virtuoso life took second place to a kind of earthy piety based on prodigious musical insight and a troth-like pledge between him and the composer. Here are some of his finest concerto recordings—notably the Brahms with Hamilton Harty (1928), the Beethoven with Bruno Walter (1932), the Prokofiev First, Mozart Fourth and the Mendelssohn with Sir Thomas Beecham (1933-35) and, at long last on LP, the Beethoven Violin and Piano Sonatas Nos. 5 and 10 with Artur Schnabel (1948). Though the sound is monaural, it has been restored lovingly and retains much of the warmth that characterized the best of Europe's prewar 78-r.p.m. shellacs.