Kellen Gray & The Royal Scottish National Orchestra: African American Voices
Linn

African American Voices testifies to the inestimable richness of the music composed by William Levi Dawson (1899-1990), George Walker (1922-2018), and William Grant Still (1895-1978). The Royal Scottish National Orchestra and its Assistant Conductor Kellen Gray bring three of their works vividly to life in performances recorded in 2022 at Scotland's Studio in Glasgow. The hour-long release is effectively structured, framing as it does Walker's eloquent Lyric for Strings (1946; revised 1990) with two symphonies of markedly different character. Though Dawson and Still both weave Afro-American elements into a symphonic fabric, the former's Negro Folk Symphony (1934; revised 1952) draws from West African folk idioms, American Negro spirituals, and early African American folk rhythms; blues and jazz, on the other hand, inform the writing of Still's Symphony No. 1 ‘Afro-American' (1931). Certainly one of the most rewarding things about African American Voices has to do with the contrasts between the works, contrasts that point to the broad musical range commanded by the composers.

No one would seem to be better qualified for the project than Gray, a native of Rock Hill, South Carolina who cites the many folk music styles of the southeastern United States as having a pivotal influence on his musical endeavours. He's conducted many an ensemble, among them the Philharmonia Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, English National Opera, Chineke! Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, and Chicago Philharmonic. Formed in 1891 as the Scottish Orchestra, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra has established itself as one of Europe's leading symphony orchestras and has won numerous awards for its recordings, including a 2020 Gramophone Classical Music Award for Chopin's piano concertos.

One thing the works share is each reflects its composer's personal blending of Black vernacular forms and Western Classical elements. Like all artists, Dawson, Walker, and Still were influenced by the world in which they grew up, one that for the Mississippi-born Still and Alabama-born Dawson, as descendants of once-enslaved people, included slavery and direct experience of nineteenth-century Black music and folk traditions. Their work experiences also naturally helped shape the music they would later write. Still worked with W. C. Handy in Memphis, and in New York and Los Angeles moved between popular music, musical theatre, radio, film, and television circles. While studying classical music, Dawson worked as a jazz trombonist and music educator and even played with Louis Armstrong before becoming director of Tuskegee's School of Music in 1931. Walker, part of the second generation of twentieth-century African American composers and the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, studied at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, The Curtis Institute of Music, and the Eastman School of Music, and even with Nadia Boulanger in France. While their life experiences were markedly different, it hardly surprises that traces of spirituals, jazz, folk, and blues should surface in the works they created.

Dawson's Negro Folk Symphony is in three movements, each suggestively titled. “The Bond of Africa” is distinguished by dramatic orchestral sweep and powerful melodic content, including a plaintive theme the composer referred to as the ‘missing link' motif and that was intended to symbolize the momentous break that occurred when the first African was enslaved in the Transatlantic trade. There's lightheartedness too, however, in the movement as shown by the inclusion of buoyant dance episodes alongside the solemnity of the primary motif. The lyrical central movement, “Hope in the Night,” arrests the ear instantly with a sombre, oboe-centred introduction and follows it with folk-inflected passages that alternate between majestic and playful. The spiritual-folk dimension is even more pronounced in the closing movement, “O, Le' Me Shine, Shine Like a Morning Star!,” in its evocative melodies and the jubilation of its dance component.

The recording's shortest work at six minutes, Walker's Lyric for Strings, which began as the second movement of his first string quartet, parts company from the others' pieces in making the African American idioms less explicit, though they're still there. Walker's formerly enslaved grandmother died shortly after he began composing the movement, a version of which became the string orchestra setting Lament and which, revised and expanded, eventually became Lyric for Strings. Suitably elegiac, the piece expands from a luscious intro into an expression of affecting emotional poignancy. The RSNO's strings give delicate, tender voice to Walker's contrapuntal writing and in doing so amplify its beauty.

Still's four-part ‘Afro-American' Symphony follows, its incorporation of jazz and blues evident the moment “Longing: Moderato assai” introduces the work. After the voicing of ear-catching blues and spiritual themes, the material advances into a semi-pastoral realm before returning to lengthier explorations of blues, jazz, and spiritual content. At such moments, it's easy to forget that one's listening to a formal classical work as opposed to one performed by a blues-jazz ensemble at a NYC venue. While tenderness surfaces again, this time in the rendering of the spiritual-flavoured “Sorrow: Adagio,” joy and abandon permeate the raucous “Humor: Animato,” one part of which calls Gershwin's later “I Got Rhythm” strongly to mind. At album's end, “Aspiration: Lento, con risoluzione” begins in a sombre, ruminative mode before developing into a robust allegro.

December 2022