During the 2005-6 season, Gwyneth Walker traveled across the US working with a variety of musicians as they premiered and recorded her works. During a week spent in Walla Walla, WA, she worked with the choirs at Whitman College as they rehearsed and recorded this new program of choral music, which employs evocative texts by Langston Hughes, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and Virginia Hamilton Adair, among others. Booklet notes include the full song texts. 17 World Premiere Recordings! "Gwyneth Walker is a master composer with a fertile imagination..."

This release features the works of Gywneth Walker, one of the most important composers of our modern day. Widely performed throughout the world, the music of Gwyneth Walker is beloved by performers and audiences alike for its energy, beauty, reverence, drama and humor. Dr. Walker is a graduate of Brown University and the Hartt School of Music. Walker's catalog includes over 300 commissioned works for orchestra, chamber ensembles, chorus, and solo voice.

The National Symphony Orchestra will presents the complete sinfonias of George Walker. "The National Symphony Orchestra's unprecedented digital recording cycle offers an opportunity to experience my father's compositional evolution in context for the first time. Peter Laki's text, Frank Schramm's photography, and, of course, the committed artistry of Maestro Noseda and the musicians make a compelling argument for this music's enduring significance." (Gregory Walker, son of George Walker)

The Royal Scottish National Orchestra teams up with its Assistant Conductor Kellen Gray to record works by three of the twentieth century’s greatest African American voices. Released to coincide with Black History Month, the two symphonies by William Levi Dawson and William Grant Still proved to be fundamental in the utilization of Afro-American idioms within the symphonic form. Each composer focused on one of the two original staples of African American music: folk and jazz.

William Levi Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony takes its inspiration from West African folk idioms, American Negro spirituals and early African American folk rhythms and songs from Gullah culture. William Grant Still’s Symphony No. 1 draws its influence from elements popular in jazz and pre-jazz popular genres. Although the latter is the more well-known figure in American music, Dawson was every bit as significant in the timeline of African American music, and his only published symphony is astonishingly mature for a composer’s earliest efforts at symphonic writing. This program also celebrates the centenary of George Walker’s birth with the inclusion of his Lyric for Strings.

The pieces in this album represent the Miró Quartet’s artistic home in many ways. The four works include two new commissions for the Miró by Kevin Puts and Caroline Shaw, as well as works by George Walker and Samuel Barber. The concept of home and our complex relation to it is woven in a variety of ways into all the music in this album: this music invites you to feel, reflect, and engage in Miró’s world. This is Miró second album.

George Walker is one of the few leading American composers of the 20th century to produce as many as five piano sonatas. Taken together, they securely chart a lifetime of stylistic change. Walker managed many other feats, a number of them connected to being the first Black person to break through various glass ceilings: the first to be accepted at the Curtis Institute of Music, the first to study with Nadia Boulanger, and the first to win the Pulitzer Prize in Music. Walker is also one of the only major composer-pianists to have recorded worthy performances of virtuoso standard repertoire including Beethoven’s “Emperor Concerto” and the Brahms second piano concerto.

REVIEW:

"This beautifully played (and beautifully recorded) set of George Walker's piano sonatas by pianist Steven Beck is especially valuable. The sonatas trace Walker's development as a composer, from a sort of post-Copland style through an approach to serialism (he only rarely adopted it wholesale, but the mark of Webernian economy is all over the second and third sonatas here), back to a broader free atonality deepened by rigor."

Walker generally resisted the use of African American vernacular material in his essentially modernist style, but he might then introduce it when it is least expected, in entirely original ways. Anyone interested in this giant of African American classical music but not knowing where to start could easily choose this release."

--AllMusicGuide.com (James Manheim)

There is a strong tradition of American piano sonatas. Off the top of my head I can think of examples by Ives, Copland, Barber, Sessions and Carter and there are, no doubt, others. To these we can add the five sonatas of George Walker, an impressive contribution to the medium, which fit neatly onto one disc.

I had not heard of George Walker until a few months ago, when he was composer of the week in the BBC Radio 3 series. I was impressed by what I heard and so was glad of this opporunity to hear these sonatas. He had a long and successful career in the USA, despite the difficulties caused by his being African-American. He always intended a life in classical music, which I note as some African-American musicians, despite being classically trained, gravitate towards jazz. There are occasional jazz references and references to spirituals and folk songs in his works, but no more than one might expect in any other American composer, Copland for example.

Despite these sonatas being composed over a period of fifty years, they have more in common than what sets any of them apart. Walker has a fondness for sinewy counterpoint and somewhat angular harmonies, rather in the Hindemith way. He also likes strong single lines and chord sequences. His idiom is clearly twentieth century but is not particularly dissonant, and he likes a good deal of rhythmic vitality.

The first two sonatas, the closest together in time, have much in common. The fondness for counterpoint and for variation form is common to them. However, the first is consistently more playful, even jaunty, while the second conveys a sense of disaster being just round the corner. The second is also the more compact, despite being in four movements rather than three, and its Scherzo is only one minute and twelve seconds long.

The third sonata has two brief movements before a longer one and here we find a new riuchness of harmonic vocabulary, even suggesting Scriabin at one point. The second movement, titled Bell, is simply a succession of slow chords. The finale features constant changes of mood and texture.

The fourth sonata, in two movements only, is more angular than the earlier works. there are many ideas, among which leaping single lines, bell-like chorales and a fugal toccata are noteworthy.

The fifth sonata is in one movement only and is a formidable work, tightly wrought and intense. Perhaps it is the finest of the five.

Steven Beck is a contemporary music specialist and offers committed performances. The recording is excellent. Walker’s music is well worth getting to know.

--MusicWeb International (Stephen Barber)

 

This sequel to the Gramophone Award-nominated Americascapes album (ODE 1396-2) by the Basque National Orchestra and Robert Trevino is a thrilling and a deeply personal journey into the music of three American composers. All three composers had very unique aesthetic worlds and with two of the composers conductor Robert Trevino also had direct artistic collaboration. Where my first 'Americascapes' album looked at lesser-known major American works that had influenced European composers (rather than the other way around), for this follow-up, I went back to a more basic thought - "What is America?". Since America is many things to millions of people, I realise that my question had to mean, "What is America to me? (...) Selecting the composers for this American Opus took well over a year. Yet I eventually refined the list to these three composers, with all of whom I feel a close kinship and all of whom are deeply meaningful to me. Two of them I even had a direct artistic relationship with. As a group, they also embody some of the diversity and the radically different aesthetics that thrive in the Americas." (Robert Trevino)

REVIEW:

The hunt for buried treasure is quite an industry these days, but coming up with gold is far from guaranteed. No problem, it appears, for Robert Treviño and the Basque National Orchestra. American Opus is the sequel to 2021’s excellent Americascapes (Ondine ODE 1396-2) and once again the Mexican-American conductor demonstrates a gift for sorting the wheat from the chaff. With the Revueltas set beside the Crumb and the Walker, Americascapes Volume 2 is a complex, thoroughly satisfying national portrait.

— Limelight

This second volume of George Walker's piano music joins its predecessor on Naxos 8.559916 (April 2024), together forming a unique complete piano works edition. On this new release, Steinway Artist Alexandre Dossin performs the cyclical Fourth Piano Sonata, which alternates between sections of virtuoso muscularity and lyrical repose, and the Piano Concerto, which integrates expansive Classical forms with inspiration derived from songs by Duke Ellington, something also cleverly hidden in Guido's Hand. The album closes with Walker's passionate Fifth Piano Sonata.

REVIEW:

Dossin makes much of the alternately moody and energetic first movement of the Piano Sonata No. 4. His ability to grasp the long line of Walker’s music is a really big factor in one’s enjoyment of his performances. The pianist's ability to use “space” in his interpretations makes these performances fascinating and ultimately rewarding.

— Art Music Lounge

The Seattle Symphony releases powerful live performances of works by two brilliant American composers, William L. Dawson and Pulitzer Prize winner George Walker. These deeply expressive scores — recorded in the stunning acoustics of Benaroya Hall — take inspiration from a variety of sources, including Negro spirituals, jazz harmonies and modernist traditions.

The music of George Walker and William Levi Dawson is a microcosm of Black classical composers’ stylistic diversity. Each draw upon African American music idioms for different settings, characters and functions. And yet, the works connect through the importance of programmatic and emotive narratives within the Black classical practice. Whether quoting or arranging spirituals, or using blues notes or serialism, the music of both Walker and Dawson tells a story, be it enormous internal journeys or a massive historical epic.

REVIEW:

The performances are universally excellent. The sound quality is full and clear. My criticisms of the music are generally minor. But all of the music is worth knowing and rewards repeated listening. This disc warrants a hearty recommendation.

-- Fanfare

This is the first of two volumes of George Walker’s complete piano works, both featuring performances by Alexandre Dossin. The three sonatas heard here offer compelling contrasts. Sonata No. 1 (rev. 1991) is his longest and utilises folk tunes, No. 2 is darker and unified by tonal relationships, while No. 3 (rev. 1996) displays contrapuntal mastery and translucent elements. The album opens with the serene and majestic Prelude and Caprice, while both Spatials and Spektra are atonal. Bauble is heard in a world premiere recording.

REVIEW:

Judging by the compositions on this album, his piano music is communicative, colorful, expressive and, above all, characteristic. As a student of Rudolf Serkin, he was himself an outstanding pianist with an impressive career in Europe and the United States. This may have been conducive to his talent as a composer. 

Pianist Alexandre Dossin shows himself to be an accomplished interpreter, making Walker’s tonal language his own with his flexible and sensitive playing.

-- Pizzicato

This is a wonderful program of works for cello and piano by composers such as Libby Larsen, Samuel Barber, and George Walker.