Recordings and performances of American composer George Walker remain frustratingly elusive, making this new album of his five Piano Sonatas especially welcome. Dr. Walker’s legacy is considerable: admitted to the Oberlin Conservatory at age 14, he soon moved onto the Curtis Institute of Music, studying piano with Rudolf Serkin and composition with Rosario Scalero. Walker proceeded to receive a doctorate from the Eastman School of Music in composition (his doctoral “thesis” was Piano Sonata No. 2) and in 1996, became the first African American composer to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his work, Lilacs, for voice and orchestra.
The piano sonatas heard here reveal a highly chromatic harmonic language that is nevertheless rooted in tonality. There is a masterful sense of musical architecture. The often-complex rhythms demonstrate an obvious love for changing meters and syncopation. And while the chordal writing in the fifth sonata might at times remind one of Messiaen, generally Walker employs linear, polyphonic textures. This is music with a fascinating variety of styles and influences, distilled into a uniquely compelling compositional voice.
Pianist Steven Beck has the full measure of this music; his perceptive and virtuosic performances often drawing out a passionate fervor not heard in the composer’s own recordings of sonatas 1 and 2. Beck makes light work of even the most difficult challenges. In the first movement of Piano Sonata No. 1, listen to how beautifully he elucidates each voice of the polyphonic texture and the variety of colors he draws out of his instrument. And in the second movement, a wonderfully inventive set of variations on the folk song “O Bury Me Beneath the Willow,” how naturally he inhabits each mercurial change of mood.
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Walker returns to the variation form in the opening movement of his second sonata. The writing is now terser (the second and third movements seemingly compressed, perhaps a nod to Sibelius’s compositional procedures). Beck plays the second movement’s whirlwind of fragmented motives with elan and draws out a disturbing darkness in the following Adagio. Beck is over a minute faster than the composer’s own performance of this work, though nothing seems rushed in Beck’s reading. Walker’s playing is just as technically assured, but his approach is more objective, emotionally reticent when compared to Beck. Walker’s Adagio is slower than Beck, yet it is Beck who finds greater emotional weight. The composer’s slightly slower tempo for the final movement does capture the “Allegretto tranquillo” more fully.
His third sonata, which utilizes serialist procedures, is the most dissonant of the five sonatas. Its second movement, Bell, is perhaps the most radical movement in any of the sonatas: a single chord played 17 times, Walker’s attempt to capture the sound of a church bell he heard in Italy. Interestingly, the fourth sonata quotes (in a bi-tonal context) the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” The single movement fifth shares the same musical and spiritual world as Messiaen’s works. There is an assured, rhapsodic lyricism that is often breathtakingly beautiful, wondrously played by Beck.
In short, this is an important and long overdue recording. Why do these works not appear more often on recordings and concert programs? This is simply wonderful music. The recording is excellent, clear, and warmly resonant, with an impressively wide dynamic range. Beck’s Steinway has a wonderfully rich color from top to bottom.
My only frustration is that the recording, at 54 minutes, could have included other works, like “Prelude and Caprice” and “Spatial” variations. No matter, having these sonatas on one recording, in such exemplary performances is cause for celebration. Could Beck and Bridge now be persuaded to give us a new recording of Walker’s concertos?
George Walker: Five Piano Sonatas
Steven Beck – Piano
Bridge Records, CD 9554
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