| GEORGE WALKER TRIBUTE |
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| Written by Anne Midgette | |
| Friday, 31 August 2007 | |
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The New York Times May 15, 2003 MUSIC REVIEW | GEORGE WALKER TRIBUTE Violinist Wishes Dad a Happy Birthday By ANNE MIDGETTE There's a sculptural quality to George Walker's music. He grasps a chord and shapes it into a range of permutations as if squeezing wet clay, violently. The handful of clay remains the same, but its surface changes with new indentations and promontories, thick and wet and dense. In 1996 Mr. Walker gained the sobriquet "first African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize in music." In 2002 he turned 80, and on Monday night the Composers Guild of New Jersey arranged a wonderful birthday season tribute: an evening of his music in fine performances by excellent soloists and ensembles. Mr. Walker, who opened the evening by performing in public for the first time with his son, Gregory — an associate professor of music and concertmaster of the Boulder Philharmonic in Colorado. They played the elder Mr. Walker's First Violin Sonata. He looked happy, and with reason. At his request, the titles of the works appeared without dates, which kept one listening for the evolutions in Mr. Walker's style. Two songs for baritone and piano, performed effectively as a set by Richard Lalli and Joan Forsyth, were written more than 30 years apart. "And Wilt Thou Leave Me Thus?" a premiere, was a highlight. The density of "Music for Brass," forcefully played by the American Brass Quintet, had an aggressive approach in common with the First Piano Sonata, written some 20 years before in 1953. Mr. Walker's chords seemed hard won: tough and biting; holding their ground with sustained bottom lines while trying out a range of upper notes; defiantly brandishing their dissonances. His pieces burst out in intense phrases, then paused to gather themselves before the next episode, physically regrouping: brass players put mutes in their instruments; the organist Trent Johnson changed the stops. Organ seemed a natural instrument for Mr. Walker's music, with its intense assaults and long sustained notes under upper melodies. "Improvisation on St. Theodulph for Organ" took a familiar hymn tune and drew it out like thick taffy into a somber extended exegesis on itself. The more recent works were more translucent in texture, the density of the music diffused through the timbres of many instruments. Take "Modus," commissioned in 1998 by the Cygnus Ensemble, which performed it here, or "Poem" from 1987. This ambitious if not quite satisfying piece was an unusual adaptation of T. S. Eliot's "Hollow Men," with the fine singer Elizabeth Farnum, costumed as a homeless person. The New York New Music Ensemble took up the fragmented musical textures on harpsichord and harp, piano and clarinet. |
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