George Crumb; 70th Birthday Album (Bridge)

This CD covers 50 years of the career of US composer, George Crumb, who'll be performing in Dublin on Thursday 16th. Crumb's reputation is for smallscale works showing acute timbral awareness in the employment of novel sonorities. It was, in fact, a hearing of Crumb's Black Angels which prompted the formation of the Kronos Quartet. The major work here is the choral and orchestral Star-Child, premiered in New York under Boulez in 1977. On such a large canvas, Crumb's gestures sound crude in an effects-driven, Ives-meets-Penderecki style that has dated badly. Mundus Canis is a "quintet" of opportunistically vivid family dog portraits for guitar and percussion. Three gentle songs from 1947 fill in the picture of Crumb some 20 years before he evolved his individual, mature style.

- Michael Dervan

Goldmark: String Quartet; String Quintet. Fourth Dimension Quartet, David Smith (cello) (ASV)

Hot on the heels of the Wexford Festival production of Die Konigin von Saba, comes a new recording of two chamber works by Karl Goldmark (1830-1915), his Op 8, a String Quartet in B flat and Op 9, a String Quintet in A minor, from 1860 and 1862 respectively. On the opening night in Wexford, only the more excitable moments of Goldmark's score came across well; in the Quartet here, it's the sorrowful slow movement which leaves the strongest impression. The quintet follows Boccherini and Schubert in using two cellos, and, again, it's in the slow movement that the young Goldmark manages his most touchingly characterful writing. The performances are mild in manner, the recording close.

- Michael Dervan

Works for piano and orchestra by Falla, Martinu, Alexander Tcherepnin, Weber (DG Galleria)

The common factor in this enterprising mid-price collection is the Swiss pianist Margrit Weber, best known as the dedicatee of Stravinsky's Movements for piano and orchestra, which she premiered in 1960 at the age of 36. Two of the works here were also dedicated to and premiered by her: Martinu's Fifth Concerto (one of his last works) and Alexander Tcherepnin's Ten Bagatelles (in their final, orchestral version). For anyone interested in these byways of the 20th-century piano repertoire, Weber's lithe, cleanly-lit playing, sympathetically supported by conductors Rafael Kubelik and Ferenc Fricsay, makes this disc self-recommending. In Falla and Weber her 1960s-style interpretative objectivity now sounds just a little on the dry side.

- Michael Dervan