Description
Review: American Record Guide, March/April 1998 by Mark Lehman
“DARK FIRES: 20th Century American Music”, Karen Walwyn: Pianist
Albany Records
Dolores White: Toccata; Lettie Alston: 3 Rhapsodies;Tania Leon: Ritual
Hale Smith: Evocation; Roger Dickerson: Sonatina; Jeffrey Mumford: Fragments
Adolphus Hailstork: Sonata #1
I won’t even bother to disapprove of the marketing strategy behind this disc- a program of piano music by 20th Century Black American Composers : “Dark Fires”- get it? With the sultry black pianist on the cover in fetching pose and low-cut dress. Despite all this positioning and posturing, Walwyn is a confident and impressive pianist, and her well-recorded program (almost all first recordings, surely) is varied and interesting, the pieces unsullied by cheap compromise or shallow gimmicks.
Three are by composers new to me and no doubt very seldom (if ever) before represented on disc. Dolores White’s Toccata is angular, chromatic, and steely in a Prokofief war sonata vein-a forward-driving show piece of real substance and urgency. Lettie’s Three Rhapsodies are also fairly chromtaic, but exotic in flavor and more improvisatory in form, though still clean-lined in texture, Roger Dickerson’s Sonatina on the very different other hand, is tuneful, suave, flowing, and calmly diatonic, as much like early Rorem as Richard Cumming’s music reviewed earlier in this issue. The first movement is especially winsome.
The remaining four composers are, if not widely celebrated, then at least known among those of us who make it our business to know the music of as many living composers as we can: all of them have had several other works recorded. Two are represented by short but characteristic pieces. Tania Leon’s Ritual is intended to conjure up a barbaric ceremony: it consists almost entirely of frenzied repetition of a single jagged gesture and sounds to me more like a furiously deranged robot than any human ceremony. Hale Smith’s Evocation is a study in quiet, atonal fragments that achieves a gnomic mysteriousness.
Two longer works complete the program. Jeffrey Mumford’s Framgents from the Surrounding Evening is an atonal -impressionist tone- painting similar in mood to Smith’s flights of fancy. Finally, at nearly half-an- hour in length, Adolphus Hailstork’s First Sonata is much the biggest and most ambitious piece here-a powerful and virtuoso four- movement work in a dense, chromatic, often dissonant but never pointillist idiom. It ranges from the unpredictable volatility and violence of the opening sonata-allegro and the catchy jazz inflected rhythms and blusey harmonies of the scherzo, to the dreamy remoteness that wells up into monumentality of the nocturne and the rugged, heroic transformations of the old spritiual that generate the work’s finale.
This is a disc that I will return to with pleasure and admiration, particularly for the White, Dickerson, and Hailstork pieces. And maybe, I might as well admit, for another look at the cover, too.
Karen (verified owner) –
DARK FIRES • Karen Walwyn (pn) • ALBANY TROY 266 (73:41)
D. WHITE Toccata. ALSTON 3 Rhapsodies for
Piano. LÉON Ritual. HALE
SMITH Evocation. DICKERSON Sonatina. MUMFORD Fragments
from the Surrounding Evening. HAILSTORK Piano Sonata No. 1
This happens to be a collection of music by composers of African extraction, but I
didn't realize it until after several listens. There is no thread that connects these
composers by ethnicity; this is a diverse and compelling selection of music, by any
standard.
All of this music is marked by distinct personal styles and passionate, anxious
momentum. Delores White's Toccata as well as Lettie Beckon Alston's Three
Rhapsodies present traditional forms in a chromatic, energetic, and firmly shaped
manner. Roger Dickerson's Sonatina is the most conventional work on the
program, although it is not utterly derivative. Dickerson displays a fine lyrical gift
in this work, the most approachable music on this disc.
Cuban-born Tania Léon wrote Ritual to mark the 20-year anniversary of her arrival
in the United States. It describes her artistic and professional journey with spikey
energy, expressed across a broad crescendo. Hale Smith's Evocation follows a less
direct path, and is full of dramatic gestures. Smith attempts to relate serialist
language with jazz-influenced rhythms. Jeffrey Mumford's music is, as the title
suggests, inspired by the random beauties of nature. The music is an abstract
impression of changing weather patterns, overtly programmatic at one level, but
darkly emotional as well.
Adolphus Hailstork's 1980 Sonata is an ambitious, large-scale work, filled with
strong melodies cloaked in dense harmonies and complex rhythms. The composer
achieves a masterful integration of such folk idioms as blues, spirituals, and jazz
into a tautly conceived classical sonata form. The glorious melodiousness of
Ellington sings out in the finale. Despite all of these influences, Hailstork produces
a singular voice, and one which I would look forward to hearing from again in
future works.
Karen Walwyn, who is on the faculty at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor,
gets through this technically demanding program with aplomb. Her rhythmic
nimbleness is especially notable. Here is collection of composers who deserve a
higher profile. Peter Burwasser