Information
Composer: William Grant Still
- Can'tcha Line 'Em
- 3 Visions: No. 2, Summerland
- Quit Dat Fool'nish
- Pastorela
- American Suite: I. Indian Love Song
- American Suite: II. Danse
- American Suite: III. Lament
- Fanfare for the 99th Fighter Squadron
- Serenade for Orchestra
- Violin Suite: I. African Dancer
- Violin Suite: II. Mother and Child
- Violin Suite: III. Gamin
- Threnody: In Memory of Jean Sibelius
Zina Schiff, violin
Royal Scottish National Orchestra
Avlana Eisenberg, conductor
Date: 2022
Label: Naxos
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This grab-bag programme of works by William Grant Still (1895-1978) spans most of the composer’s long and distinguished career. His American Suite (c1918), for instance, comes from his days as an undergraduate at Wilberforce University in Ohio. Cast in three brief movements, it’s largely built from tunes clearly meant to evoke Native American music. The final ‘Lament’ is by far the most individual, with an atmospheric introduction that sets a nocturnal scene right out of a bel canto opera.
Everything here is, in some sense, a miniature. The Fanfare for the 99th Fighter Squadron (1945) – in honour of the 992 black Tuskegee Airmen who fought for the US in the Second World War – lasts less than a minute. Can’t You Line ’Em (1940) is an oddly bright, four-minute-long fantasy on a prison work song (online you can find a 1936 field recording by James Wilson from a Virginia penitentiary that puts the song in its grim context). Summerland (1936), an arrangement of the second of three Visions for solo piano, is a little charmer marked by piquant harmonies. And the sombre Threnody: In Memory of Jean Sibelius (1965), with its unexpected echoes of African American Spirituals, is from Still’s last decade.
Despite their occasional felicities, none of the aforementioned works are from the composer’s top drawer. Pastorela (1946), on the other hand, ‘a tone picture of a California landscape’, is rhapsodic, colourfully scored (Still worked in Hollywood in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and it shows), subtly inflected here and there with jazzy harmonies (as at 4'05"), and packs quite a lot of incident into 12 mintues, including a surprisingly dramatic turn near the end. The Violin Suite (1943) is also inspired by three images in the 1940 book The Negro in Art. Try the bluesy, swaying bit in the middle of the opening movement, ‘African Dancer’, or the Grappelli-like flights of fancy in the finale, ‘Gamin’, although the prize is the gorgeous ‘Mother and Child’ at the suite’s centre, with its undulating, sing-songy melody.
The Pastorela has been recorded previously, most notably in a white-hot 1946 performance by violinist Louis Kaufman (the work’s dedicatee), with Bernard Herrmann conducting (Cambria). But while the Violin Suite has been recorded in its original version for violin and piano (as has the Pastorela) – including superb renditions by Rachel Barton Pine (Cedille, 2/19) and Randall Goosby (Decca, 8/21) – I’m grateful to have heard the orchestral version. Zina Schiff is a fine player, although the close microphone placement can make her tone seem strident, and the RSNO, led by Schiff’s daughter Avlana Eisenberg, sound under-rehearsed and more than a bit stodgy. Nevertheless, this is a worthwhile addition to Still’s discography.
-- Andrew Farach-Colton, Gramophone
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William Grant Still (May 11, 1895– December 3, 1978) was an American composer of nearly two hundred works, including five symphonies, four ballets, nine operas, over thirty choral works, art songs, chamber music, and solo works. He was a student of George Chadwick and Edgard Varèse. Often referred to as the "Dean of Afro-American Composers," Still was the first American composer to have an opera produced by the New York City Opera. He is known primarily for his first symphony, Afro-American Symphony (1930), which was, until 1950, the most widely performed symphony composed by an American.
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Avlana Eisenberg, music director of the Boston Chamber Symphony, has conducted orchestras throughout the US, Europe, and the UK. Her discography includes recordings with the Budapest Symphony Orchestra MÁV, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, and the Salzburg Chamber Soloists. The recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to work at the Paris National Opera, Eisenberg graduated from Yale University, where she received the V. Browne Irish Award for Excellence in the Performing Arts. She earned graduate degrees in orchestral conducting from the University of Michigan and the Peabody Institute.
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Zina Schiff (born 1951 in Los Angeles, California), a Heifetz protégée, has performed, recorded, and given masterclasses on five continents. In the US, she has given solo performances with the orchestras of Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Rochester, Brooklyn, San Antonio, Nashville, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. Schiff’s honours include the Young Musicians Foundation Debut Award, the San Francisco Symphony Foundation Award, and a grant from the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music. While at the Curtis Institute, she won both the Junior and Senior Auditions of the Philadelphia Orchestra.
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