Home Page Front Page E-Mail January 27, 1998

[Music of] George Walker. Serenata for Chamber Orchestra; Lyric for Strings; Poäme for Violin and Orchestra; Orpheus for Chamber Orchestra; Folk Songs for Orchestra. Cleveland Chamber Symphony, Edwin London, conductor. (Albany, CD # TROY 270) 1997.

American composer George Walker (b. 1922) was awarded the 1996 Pulitzer Prize in music for his composition "Lilacs," the first black composer to receive the prize for music in the eighty-year history of the awards. This new album from Albany/Troy does not contain that composition, but offers a tasty plate of works by Walker. Lyric for Strings was written in 1946, but the other works in the collection date from the 1980s and 90s. Walker has published over seventy works in his long career, most written for symphony or chamber orchestra, though "Lilacs," the work for which he won the Pulitzer, is a setting for soprano and orchestra of a portion of Walt Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd."

George Walker began his career as a concert pianist, but after becoming ill on an extended European concert tour, he decided his health was not up to the demands of performing on tour, and he turned to composing. He studied at the Curtis Institute and the Eastman School, and at the American Conservatory of Music in France he was one of the generation of American composers to study with Nadia Boulanger. He has taught composition at a number of U.S. colleges and universities, and was chairman of the music department of Rutgers University's Newark campus until his retirement from academics. He continues to work, however, and was reportedly sitting at his Steinway working on a new piece when he received the news of his Pulitzer award.

The earliest piece in this collection is Lyric, a one-movement lament that Walker wrote while still a graduate student in memory of his grandmother. Serenata for Chamber Orchestra, from 1983, was commissioned by George Pelham Head in memory of his wife, Patricia Head. And the Poäme for Violin and Orchestra, a "revised version of an earlier Violin Concerto," was dedicated to the composer's mother, "in tribute to her extraordinary devotion to her family." These dedications might give an impression that Walker's music is characteristically elegiac or downright gloomy. This is not the case. Even the pieces commemorating the dead are intense and dramatic works, built from tightly stated themes erected on elaborate and elegant structures.

The most overtly dramatic piece on the album is Orpheus for Chamber Orchestra, completed in 1994. The piece uses brief bits of narration together with the music to tell the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Poäme for Violin and Orchestra is also a highly dramatic piece, though not in the same programmatic way. Written in three movements, the piece "alternates between an intense lyricism and dramatic qualities...particularly in the final movement," in the composer's words. After a brief introduction, a violin cadenza states the basic thematic material of the piece, following which "the introduction is restated in a more rhythmic guise." Solo violin "excursions" in the second movement "are framed by the dramatic opening measure that recurs at the end of the movement." The third movement closes the work with a restrained and somewhat anti-climactic note.

You can hear Poäme for Violin and Orchestra by George Walker on WHIL-FM (91.3) Thursday, February 5 at 7:30 PM as part of their weekly series of music from after 1950.

--J. Green