Helen Taylor, the wife of the pianist Grant
Johannesen, died in an auto accident at the age of 34 in 1950.
Under the wing of the Utahn recording company Tantara Records
this collection has been issued and serves both as a source of
pleasure and surprise and as a memorial to Helen Taylor's compositional
talents.
The Symphony sounds familiar, drawn from gestures
we more readily associate with Roy Harris and Tippett and suggestive
of wide open spaces. Here she penned great wheeling string themes
and haunting music for the woodwind. This is music to sear, search
and probe, often wonderfully magical, full of verve and lightness
and very personal. The symphony ends in a clangourous statement.
The Sonata for Two Flutes is a ‘Huntress Diana’
of a piece in four movements. It is businesslike and of Dionysiac
speed accentuated by the intimacy of the breathy playing. The
Piano Sonata’s spiky angularity is lightly dusted with dissonance
and notable for its elegiac theme. After the two movement unconventionality
of the Piano Sonata the Violin Sonata returns to conventional
three movement form. This is jazzy and in the Gershwinnying finale
wildly woolly.
The disc is extremely well documented - virtually
an encyclopedia entry on the details of the life story of Helen
Taylor and her music. A reputation rescued from unforgiving obscurity.
Long overdue justice has now been done to the mid-Western music
of Helen Taylor.
Rob Barnett
LA East Studio
Orchestra/Ralph Laycock (symphony)