GEORGE CRUMB (1929-2022): Music for a Summer Evening (Makrokosmos III) (1974)

I. Nocturnal Sounds (The Awakening) 00:55 II. Wanderer-Fantasie 07:08 III. The Advent 12:36 IV. Myth 22:16 V. Music of the Starry Night 29:16 The three larger movements carry poetic quotations which were very much in my thoughts during the sketching-out process and which, I believe, find their symbolic resonance in the sounds of Summer Evening. Nocturnal Sounds is inscribed with an excerpt from Quasimodo: “Odo risonanze effimere, oblío di piena notte nell’acqua stellata” (“I hear ephemeral echoes, oblivion of full night in the starred water”). The Advent is associated with a passage from Pascal: “Le silence éternel des espaces infinis m’effraie” (“The eternal silence of infinite space terrifies me”). And the last movement, Music of the Starry Night, cites these transcendently beautiful images of Rilke: “Und in den Nächten fällt die schwere Erde aus allen Sternen in die Einsamkeit. Wir alle fallen. Und doch ist Einer, welcher dieses Fallen unendlich sanft in seinen Händen halt” (“And in the nights the heavy Earth is falling from all the stars down into loneliness. We are all falling. And yet there is One who holds this falling endlessly gently in His hands”).