George WALKER (1922-2018)
Piano Sonata No.1 (1953, revised 1991) [14:24]
Piano Sonata No.2 (1956) [9:00]
Piano Sonata No.3 (1974, revised 1996) [11:46]
Piano Sonata No.4 (1984) [13:16]
Piano Sonata No.5 (2003) [4:47]
Steven Beck (piano)
eec. February 2021, Oktaven Audio, Mount Vernon, USA
BRIDGE 9554 [53:13]
George Walker was born in Washington D.C. in June 1922. His father, from the West Indies, was the son of a slave. Walker was introduced to music as a child and began piano lessons at the age of 5. His progress was such that, when 14, he gave an invited recital at Howard University (in Washington). He was awarded, at the same age, a full scholarship to study at Oberlin College, Ohio from where he graduated with great success at the age of 18. After graduation from Oberlin, he studied composition (with Rosario Scalero) and piano (with Rudolf Serkin) at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. In 1955 he earned a doctorate from the Eastman School of Music (in Rochester NY). In 1957 an award from the Fulbright Programme enabled him to spend two years in France, studying with Nadia Boulanger and Robert Casadesus. Walker’s music is very firmly grounded in the Western classical tradition and there are few passages where it hints (as, for example, in some oblique allusions to spirituals or the occasional jazz rhythm) that it might be the work of an African American composer. That didn’t prevent his normally being described as ‘an African American composer’ in the American media; this makes one wonder whether the absence of the qualifying adjective ‘African’ from the title of Walker’s 2019 autobiography, Reminiscences of An American Composer and Pianist, wasn’t very purposeful. In 1996 Walker had been the first black composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, for his powerful four-movement work Lilacs, for Soprano and Orchestra a setting of stanzas from Walt Whitman’s elegy for Abraham Lincoln, ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’.
Many genres are represented in Walker’s output, such as art songs (including some settings of Emily Dickinson), works for various chamber ensembles, works for orchestra, concertos for piano, violin, cello and trombone, works for organ and piano (on both of which Walker was an accomplished performer). In an interview conducted in 1998 (‘An Interview with George Walker’, Musical Quarterly, 84:3, 2000, pp.372-388). Walker makes it clear (p.377) that what sustained him through his studies was his desire to make a career as a concert pianist, “It was what I had worked for when I was a student at the Curtis Institute. I expected to be a concert pianist”. And, indeed, he had a good deal of success as a pianist both in the USA and Europe. However, in part because he became ill during his first tour, in 1954, of 7 European countries and in part because he found it harder than his white contemporaries to get concert bookings in the USA, he gradually devoted more of his time to composing and teaching, while still giving occasional concerts.
In the interview referenced above, Walker says “With Boulanger, the question of my doing exercises never came up. When I had my first meeting with her and showed her one of my songs, she said, "You are a composer … She never said at any time that I needed theory or harmony … I had composed two piano sonatas which I showed to her; she immediately recognized that I wasn’t a student.” Those two piano sonatas were presumably Walker’s Nos. 1 and 2 and, when one hears them played on this disc by Steven Beck, it is not surprising that Boulanger recognised in Walker someone better described as a ‘composer’ than a ‘student’ (even making such allowances as we can for the fact that we hear sonata No.1 as revised by Walker in 1991). .
Walker’s first Sonata has three movements (‘Allegro Energico’ – ‘Theme and Six Variations’ – ‘Allegro con brio’). Steven Beck does justice to the first movement’s marking ‘energico’, while not failing to articulate its rather complex contrapuntal texture with impressive lucidity. The second movement’s theme, if I am not mistaken, is the folksong ‘O Bury Me Beneath the Willow’, used as the basis for Walker’s set of six variations, variations which are subtly constructed and full of invention and wit; some of these variations are delicate or somewhat stately, while others have considerable percussive vigour. The third movement, which opens with delightful playfulness, reuses some material from the opening movement. The booklet note by Ethan Iverson (best known as a jazz pianist) suggests that this first sonata offers “a post-Copland/Boulanger Americana accent”. While I can see what Iverson means, I hear more affinities with Samuel Barber – just possibly because he, like Walker, studied with Rosario Scalero. Leaving aside such quibbles, this is an assured and highly competent piece of work.
Walker’s Piano Sonata No.2 was written 3 years after his first, and was submitted as part of his Doctorate at the Eastman School of Music. In
a very brief programme note by the composer, Walker writes “The theoretical premise underlying its structure is the consistent project of third relationships. The theme of the first movement is reflected in the ground bass upon which six variations are built. The second movement, a brief scherzo, is followed by a monothematic slow movement. The fourth movement, in sonatina form, ends with a coda derived from the theme of the first movement.” The repeated use of the same interval, ties together the variations in the opening movement (‘Theme and Ten Variations’), which are not, for the most part, as interesting or attractively distinctive as those in the central movement of the first sonata. The brief presto which follows has a lively bounce which is cut across at points by some mildly surprising phrasing. By way of contrast the third movement (‘Adagio’) has a rather affecting solemnity and gravity. The fourth (and last) movement is marked ‘Allegretto tranquillo’ and, as that suggests, its mood is in marked contrast to the preceding movement, providing an untroubled conclusion to a neatly constructed sonata. It was some nineteen years before Walker wrote his third piano sonata. In fact, the version recorded here is a revision made in 1991. I suspect (though I have no access to the 1975 version) that the revision has probably accentuated the difference between the second and third sonatas. Certainly, the version we hear on this disc occupies a rather different musical world from the second sonata.
In the 1960s Walker’s interest in serialism was perhaps at its height. It is reflected in a work such as Spatials (1961) a set of six twelve-tone variations for piano. By 1975, when Walker wrote his Piano Sonata No. 3, his attitude to serialism was less ‘systematic’ than it had sometimes been in the previous decade. The Sonata operates in terms of what Ethan Iverson calls a “kind of free atonality”. In some ways just as strong an influence on this sonata seems to be a fascination with bells and how their sound can be represented and used on the piano. Of the work’s three movements (‘Fantoms’ – ‘Bell’ – ‘Choral and Fughetta’), it is the second which is the most obviously bell-like. It consists of the same complex chord played 17 times, with intervening silences of various lengths which allow the sounds to echo and fade. In ‘Fantoms’ (fantom being an archaic form of ‘phantom’) the ‘bells’ are slighter, more distant in sound, less obviously the bells of a large church or cathedral, unless we think of them as the ‘ghosts’ of such bells, by analogy with the bells of Ys in Debussy’s ‘La Cathédrale engloutié’. These lighter, more ghostly sounds, gradually give way to more obviously metallic resonances, with the sound produced by one ‘bell’ mingling with the sound of the one that succeeds it. Yet, at the same time, the music moves forward with a fluency absent from the second movement. In the closing movement, ‘Choral and Fughetta’ (should that first word perhaps read ‘Chorale’?), the first part contains some broken melodies above brief chords, while the intricate short fugue has its moments of tintinnabulation. Though I find this final movement a little disappointing, I have found more and more in this sonata each time I have listened to it. It should surely be in the repertoire of a good many pianists.
The two panels (‘Maestoso’ and ‘Tranquillo’) which make up the diptych of Walker’s Piano Sonata No.4, while they contrast (as their markings suggest) are far from being simple opposites, and material from the first movement is re-used prominently in the second. I cannot do better than quote the composer’s own programme note: “The basic sonority of Walker’s Sonata No. 4 is the resonant ringing of octaves, seconds, and fourths, allowed to vibrate in bell-like tintinnabulation. Such sounds open and close each of its two movements. The composer describes the first movement as a ‘modified sonata form.’ The exposition, comprising the bell-like material alternating with fleet passage work, ‘is followed by a middle section containing new material, and subsequently fragments of the first theme appear in diminution.’ The fortissimo return of the opening theme marks the start of the first movement’s final stage. The second movement begins with an introduction marked tranquillo. This material appears as an inversion of the principal theme of the first movement. The highly rhythmic agitato that follows is described by the composer as a rondo with contrasting sections. The first contrasting section, marked con eleganza, is a lyrical foil that gently concludes in a melodic sequence of descending thirds. The motor rhythms return. A second contrasting section, lamentoso, follows, introducing poignant references to the Spiritual, Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. When the motor rhythms return, the spiritual briefly combines with it. The repeated notes terminate on a powerful sustained chord. The dissonance dissipates to a single note, ‘F". The sonata closes ‘with one last retrospective reference, marked dolce e tranquillo, to the theme heard at the very beginning of the work’”. Usefully, this note serves as a reminder that Walker’s interest in the use of bell-like sounds on the piano had not ended with the third sonata and clarifies Walker’s relatively oblique quotation of ‘Sometimes I feel like a motherless child’. This allusion is one of the relatively few occasions when Walker’s music confronts directly the sufferings of the American negro during and after slavery. It undercuts and problematises that ‘tranquility’ promised in the movement’s marking. I found it useful to listen to one of Paul Robeson’s recordings (in which suffering and pain are articulated with great dignity) of this spiritual, before thinking further about this rich and complex work.
The last of Walker’s five piano sonatas was written when the composer was 80. It is in a single, relatively short movement (less than 5 minutes in this performance). But its brevity should not be taken to indicate that it is a lightweight piece. It is a dense (‘condensed?’) work, abounding in ideas and possibilities. Everything seems to grow organically from a four-note upwardly directed motif stated at the very beginning, which seems, in retrospect, like a plant thrusting upwards out of the darkness of the earth. The harmonies and the rhythmic patterns grow increasingly complex, but the music never gets bogged down. At times it feels as though one is picking one’s way through thick woodland, but Steven Beck is an excellently clear-eyed guide, who knows how to let in sufficient daylight. This is decidedly short as sonatas go, but it is no ‘miniature’ – such a term, as it is usually employed with regard to music, implying a lightweight piece, would be an insult here. This is five minutes of music which packs a more meaningful ‘punch’ than many compositions which are five or six times longer.
These five sonatas are not perhaps the very finest of Walker’s music (for which epithet one might nominate Lilacs, Sinfonia No. 4 Strands, Movements for Cello and Orchestra and Lyric for Strings) but, in their intimacy, they certainly demonstrate very clearly what a thoughtfully intelligent and inventive composer he was. Although his work is not without its complexities, it is never remotely hermetic and always remains readily accessible to the listener. Given how relatively underrated and largely neglected George Walker’s work remains – as, sadly, it was for much of his long life, I hope those of enquiring mind will investigate this CD. For anyone unfamiliar with Walker’s music these assured and perceptive performances by Steven Beck, beautifully recorded by Bridge, would be a good place to make its acquaintance. Though I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the quotation (a friend drew my attention to its presence on the website of the Utah Symphony), apparently Sir Simon Rattle (in 2020) said of Walker’s music that it was “not avante-garde … but tough, strong, deeply felt, extremely well put-together and absolutely his own voice”. Hear! hear!
Glyn Pursglove
