George Walker; William L. Dawson - Orchestral Works (Asher Fisch; Roderick Cox)

Information

Composer: George Walker; William L. Dawson

• Walker - Lyric for Strings
• Walker - Folksongs for Orchestra
• Walker - Lilacs for Voice & Orchestra
• Dawson - Negro Folk Symphony

Nicole Cabell, soprano

Seattle Symphony

Asher Fisch, conductor (Walker)

Roderick Cox, conductor (Dawson)

Date: 2023

Label: Seattle Symphony Media

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Review

George Walker (1922-2018) was once asked how he would feel were he to hear his music played in an elevator. His reply was telling: ‘I would be a little embarrassed because I would be the only one who would know it, probably.’ Like many Black composers, despite their achievements he and William L Dawson (1899-1900) are still only slowly gaining the wide audience they merit. This superb release from the Seattle Symphony reveals their contrasting yet complementary expressive eloquence.

Both composers write from the heart of African-American experience, skilfully deploying spirituals and religious idioms alongside jazz and Romantic – and, in Walker’s case, modernist – traditions. Here, the rich pathos of his opening Lyric for Strings(1946) carries through the programme, providing anchor and context for the ensuing, fluid emotional terrain. The orchestra rises with aplomb to the detailed and inventive writing. Swerving nimbly between Bartókian dissonance, languid bittersweetness and jaunty call-and-response, the spiritual-infused drive of Walker’s Folksongs for Orchestra (1990) lays a path to the intense, post-Lyric elegy of his Pulitzer Prize-winning Lilacs for Voice and Orchestra (1996).

Beautifully sung by Nicole Cabell, this evocative Whitman setting looks forward to spring as well as back in grief – leading smartly to Dawson’s warm, lucid Symphony. By turn rousing, sombre and sweetly melodic, its three, adroitly polyphonic movements embed spirituals in a host of ways, powerfully encapsulating Black American history through enslavement to freedom and hope.

-- Steph Power, BBC Music Magazine

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George Walker (June 27, 1922 – August 23, 2018) was an American composer, pianist, and organist. He studied at the Oberlin Conservatory and the Curtis Institute, where his teachers included Rudolf Serkin, William Primrose, Gregor Piatigorsky and Rosario Scalero. Walker received his doctorate from the Eastman School of Music, and taught at Rutgers University until 1992. He published over 90 works and received commissions from the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony and many others. Walker was the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, which he received for his work Lilacs in 1996.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Walker_(composer)

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William Levi Dawson (September 26, 1899 – May 2, 1990) was an American composer, choir director, professor, and musicologist. He studied at the Horner Institute of Fine Arts, the Chicago Musical College, and the American Conservatory of Music. Dawson began composing at a young age, and was known for his contributions to both orchestral and choral literature. His best-known works are arrangements of and variations on spirituals. Dawson's only symphony, the Negro Folk Symphony of 1934 garnered a great deal of attention at its world premiere by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_L._Dawson_(composer)

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Asher Fisch (born May 19, 1958, Jerusalem, Israel) is an Israeli conductor and pianist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asher_Fisch

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Roderick Cox (born 1987 in Macon, Georgia) is an American conductor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roderick_Cox_(conductor)

https://roderickcox.com/

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