The beguiling world of George Crumb

The music of George Crumb revels in magic and flourishes on ceremonial mystery. So a concert devoted to the 75-year-old composer, and one in which he is on hand to discuss his haunting music, will necessarily be -- unless something is very wrong -- a magical mystery tour.

Sunday night, when such a concert occurred at the Orange County Performing Arts Center as part of the Pacific Symphony’s American Music Festival, most everything was right.

No one in classical music has quite embodied the mind-bending, otherworldly spirit of the ‘60s the way Crumb did and, to a considerable extent, still does. His originality is such that his style has not only aged well but feels timeless. Of course, given his fascination with conveying altered states of consciousness, timelessness is the point.

Sunday’s program contained two ritualistic chamber works from 1971 and two later solo piano pieces. The ritual works -- 1971 counts as the ‘60s, the decades being, like much else, a bit hazy back then -- ask the players to wear masks.

Introducing his work in conversation with the festival’s artistic advisor, Joseph Horowitz, Crumb explained the masks in “Vox Balaenae” (The Voice of the Whale) as a way to draw the listener’s attention away from the personality of the performers. He also acknowledged that the masks accomplished pretty much the opposite effect, making the audience all the more interested in who was behind them. But that’s life.

It’s also just one of the beguiling paradoxes in this beguiling music. Crumb is a master of the tiny gesture. All it takes is a single strum on the sitar to transport you to a parallel universe, he said of the other ritual piece, “Lux Aeterna” (Eternal Light).

It’s true. Time and again, a little sound occurs in these relatively modest pieces that seems of monumental import. To think of “Vox Balaenae” as a trio for flute, cello and piano, for instance, is too sonically confining. The flutist Cynthia Ellis opened the piece by singing into her flute to evoke the plaintive song of the humpback whale. She also whistled and played percussion. Timothy Landauer rarely sounded like a cellist; his job was to make his instrument squeal, howl and moan primevally, serenely (and to whistle too). Gloria Cheng, the evening’s heroic, stunning pianist, made each note feel not played so much as plucked from space.

“Lux Aeterna” began with small cymbals placed on timpani and the two percussionists quickly pedaling to create drunken, shimmering glissandi. The vocal sections, sung by soprano Juliana Gondek, alternated with refrains for sitar, tablas and soprano recorder.

In the score, Crumb suggests that a dancer might participate in these “elegies,” and Tanya Durbin did so with slow elegant movements. The performers (other than the percussionists) and conductor Carl St.Clair sat on small Indian rugs on the floor -- Crumb described the piece as being like a seance. A candle burned, and Durbin dramatically snuffed it out at the end.

The solo piano pieces were “A Little Suite for Christmas, AD 1979” and the West Coast premiere of the recent “Eine Kleine Mitternachtmusik” (A Little Midnight Music), which Crumb calls a rumination on Thelonious Monk’s “ ‘Round Midnight.”

Whether inspired by Christmas or the blues, Crumb hears bells and loves to set the piano ringing. His is a music less of completed thoughts than of traces of thought. He skims the surface of Monk’s tune and then seems to get lost inside the sound of the piano.

But as disarmingly out of this world as Crumb can be, the composer is just as disarmingly of it. His magical mystery tours are not without humor. He parodies his own primeval urges.

And then there is the man himself. Friendly, funny, avuncular, a little goofy even, he tends to deflect most questions about the deeper meaning of his music, saying that it’s just what comes to him. But what comes to him is an advanced sound world, eerily eloquent and unearthly, precisely realized and beautifully produced. Sunday night, he didn’t fool anyone. This is wonderfully profound music.