(continue Excerpts from LATimes: By MARK SWED / CLASSICAL MUSIC CRITIC / JAN. 17, 2020)
Maybe that’s not quite fair. Walker has never been entirely off the radar, and last year the Seattle Symphony garnered a certain amount of attention when it gave the first live performance of Walker’s last completed score, “Visions.” The fifth in a series of symphonic works he called sinfonias and completed in 2016, it pays tribute, with compelling forcefulness and affecting grace, to the victims of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church shooting a year before in Charleston, S.C. At the time of his death, Walker was working on a piece for the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Walker’s music is uncompromising. It can be thorny. Like Bach, Stravinsky and Webern, he made music with a jeweler’s precision, and he didn’t wear his emotions on his sleeve. Like their music, his work demands — and magnificently rewards — deep listening.
Even so, about the only month in which I ever encounter a piece by Walker on a concert program is February, because that is Black History Month. Walker gets all the respect in the world for being an important black composer. He just doesn’t get nearly enough love for his music and has far too long lacked enough champions among our most prominent performers.
But once you get the Walker bug, you begin to think that this has to change. This just might be the moment it will. Valitutto opening a hip recital with the Fifth Sonata feels like a sign. It is a piece that grabs immediately. For a second or two, it sounds as though it came from modernist 1930s, in the manner of a young Copland. No, it’s too crystalline for that. More Stravinsky instead. No, not that either.
Before long it dawns on you that the sonata inhabits a world of its own. Its strength is in Walker’s confidence in the potential power contained in a grouping of a few notes. Hearing them in a Walker-ian way is akin to studying a leaf under a microscope to understand a tree. The word that comes to mind when I listen to Walker’s works is “nourishment.” They offer some kind of mysterious sustenance.
Last week the BBC’s classical music station, Radio 3, a mainstay of Britain’s musical life, just happened to make Walker composer of the week, devoting an hour a day, Monday through Friday, to an illuminating discussion of Walker’s music with his son, violinist Gregory Walker.
The series, archived for a month on the station’s website, was an ear opener. Walker had strong reasons to cover his emotions. He was a graciously expressive pianist (there is a wonderful performance from 1956 of him playing Brahms’ Second Piano Concerto), but a concert career meant dealing with racism on two levels. One was exclusionary. The other, especially in Europe, was condescending.
Ultimately, Walker found he had the best chance for a career in academia, most of it spent at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He was said to have been a demanding teacher as well as a highly self-critical composer. His African American identity is clearly in his music but sometimes found only deep under the surface. An Ellington tune or a spiritual might take an analytical sleuth to find, the notes elongated, played backward or otherwise hidden in the compositional DNA.
Walker’s music takes much of its vitality from an inner rather than outer sense of identity. He had to endure always being identified as the first black to graduate from the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied with Rudolf Serkin, or as the first black composer to win a Pulitzer. He lived haunted by what his grandmother said it was like to have been a slave: “They did everything but eat us.”
All of that is in his music, with its celebration of identity, its heartbreak, its elegance, its thrill of being, its honesty. But Walker buries his ego. He doesn’t give away easy emotion. There are no easy outs in Walker’s music; what he has to say is too important for that. He insists that listeners enter into expression rather than be told how to feel. Good places to start with Walker are his piano and violin concertos. When you get under their skin, they will get under yours. They, along with a whole host of solo, chamber, orchestral and vocal works, are just waiting for major soloists and conductors to discover them.
Thanks to Albany Records, which has made a cause of Walker’s music, and other labels, discovery is not all that difficult. Yet, as with the BBC composer of the week, we have to turn to Europe, the only place where many of the orchestral pieces could be recorded.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
Maybe that’s not quite fair. Walker has never been entirely off the radar, and last year the Seattle Symphony garnered a certain amount of attention when it gave the first live performance of Walker’s last completed score, “Visions.” The fifth in a series of symphonic works he called sinfonias and completed in 2016, it pays tribute, with compelling forcefulness and affecting grace, to the victims of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church shooting a year before in Charleston, S.C. At the time of his death, Walker was working on a piece for the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Walker’s music is uncompromising. It can be thorny. Like Bach, Stravinsky and Webern, he made music with a jeweler’s precision, and he didn’t wear his emotions on his sleeve. Like their music, his work demands — and magnificently rewards — deep listening.
Even so, about the only month in which I ever encounter a piece by Walker on a concert program is February, because that is Black History Month. Walker gets all the respect in the world for being an important black composer. He just doesn’t get nearly enough love for his music and has far too long lacked enough champions among our most prominent performers.
But once you get the Walker bug, you begin to think that this has to change. This just might be the moment it will. Valitutto opening a hip recital with the Fifth Sonata feels like a sign. It is a piece that grabs immediately. For a second or two, it sounds as though it came from modernist 1930s, in the manner of a young Copland. No, it’s too crystalline for that. More Stravinsky instead. No, not that either.
Before long it dawns on you that the sonata inhabits a world of its own. Its strength is in Walker’s confidence in the potential power contained in a grouping of a few notes. Hearing them in a Walker-ian way is akin to studying a leaf under a microscope to understand a tree. The word that comes to mind when I listen to Walker’s works is “nourishment.” They offer some kind of mysterious sustenance.
Last week the BBC’s classical music station, Radio 3, a mainstay of Britain’s musical life, just happened to make Walker composer of the week, devoting an hour a day, Monday through Friday, to an illuminating discussion of Walker’s music with his son, violinist Gregory Walker.
The series, archived for a month on the station’s website, was an ear opener. Walker had strong reasons to cover his emotions. He was a graciously expressive pianist (there is a wonderful performance from 1956 of him playing Brahms’ Second Piano Concerto), but a concert career meant dealing with racism on two levels. One was exclusionary. The other, especially in Europe, was condescending.
Ultimately, Walker found he had the best chance for a career in academia, most of it spent at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He was said to have been a demanding teacher as well as a highly self-critical composer. His African American identity is clearly in his music but sometimes found only deep under the surface. An Ellington tune or a spiritual might take an analytical sleuth to find, the notes elongated, played backward or otherwise hidden in the compositional DNA.
Walker’s music takes much of its vitality from an inner rather than outer sense of identity. He had to endure always being identified as the first black to graduate from the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied with Rudolf Serkin, or as the first black composer to win a Pulitzer. He lived haunted by what his grandmother said it was like to have been a slave: “They did everything but eat us.”
All of that is in his music, with its celebration of identity, its heartbreak, its elegance, its thrill of being, its honesty. But Walker buries his ego. He doesn’t give away easy emotion. There are no easy outs in Walker’s music; what he has to say is too important for that. He insists that listeners enter into expression rather than be told how to feel. Good places to start with Walker are his piano and violin concertos. When you get under their skin, they will get under yours. They, along with a whole host of solo, chamber, orchestral and vocal works, are just waiting for major soloists and conductors to discover them.
Thanks to Albany Records, which has made a cause of Walker’s music, and other labels, discovery is not all that difficult. Yet, as with the BBC composer of the week, we have to turn to Europe, the only place where many of the orchestral pieces could be recorded.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
BQForum: With Appreciation for the above Excerpt Los Angeles Times /
Commentary by MARK SWED / Classical Music Critic / Jan. 17, 2020
To read entire Commentary Click Here
Commentary by MARK SWED / Classical Music Critic / Jan. 17, 2020
To read entire Commentary Click Here