Elizabeth Newkirk: The Americanist
Bright Shiny Things

It's not uncommon for a musician to include liner notes with a recording; it is, however, unusual for one to craft a probing, academic-styled essay as pianist Elizabeth Newkirk has done for The Americanist. Her same-titled written piece brings context to the album content in identifying the myriad historical strands that helped shape the American myth and, more germane to the hour-long release, the things that connect the material she laid down in late 2020 at a private Indiana studio, Ravel's La Valse, Gershwin's An American in Paris, and William Grant Still's Africa: A Suite for Solo Piano.

While the varied programme—three interwar orchestral works transcribed for solo piano—involves a piece by a French composer and two others casting their gaze beyond US borders, all are united by specific American qualities. Ravel's creation reflects his burgeoning interest in American music, and even though Gershwin's and Still's look, respectively, to Paris and Africa for inspiration, their character remains undeniably American. The inclusion of a work by Still, sometimes called the “Dean of Afro-American composers,” is appropriate too, not just for its merit as a musical entity but for implicitly referencing the critical dimension of race in American history.

Ravel dismissed interpretations that cast La Valse, written between 1919 and 1920, as a comment on the decay of Viennese culture or as a dance of death; in his own words, “one should only see in it what the music expresses: an ascending progression of sonority, to which the stage comes along to add light and movement.” In his preface to the score, Ravel describes an immense hall in a nineteenth-century imperial court where waltzing couples can be faintly discerned through misty clouds and the light of chandeliers explodes during the music's fortissimo moments. Consistent with that, the music gradually blossoms into a sweeping panorama that dynamically rises and falls for thirteen enrapturing minutes, and Newkirk delivers a commanding performance of a rousing work that in its single-piano arrangement demands much from its interpreter.

There's swagger to Gershwin's An American in Paris but intense longing too. The piece came about after he traveled to Paris in 1926 intent on studying with Ravel, who supposedly rebuffed him by saying, “Why be a second-rate Ravel when you can be a first-rate Gershwin?” Regardless, the overseas visit proved inspirational for material that premiered in December 1928 at Carnegie Hall. The story-line intimated by the score is well-known: after experiencing the thrill of being in Paris,the American experiences homesickness, expressed musically in the striking blues turn that arises midway through, before re-embracing the joy of being in the beloved French city. In the opening minutes, the visceral sensation of experiencing Paris on foot is musically conveyed by the effervescence of the walking rhythms and the sounds of taxi horns. Again, Newkirk's virtuosic performance exemplifies a full immersion in Gershwin's soundworld and grasp of the emotional terrain encompassed by the work.

The piano version of Still's symphonic poem is in three contrasting parts, “Land of Peace,” “Land of Romance,” and “Land of Superstition,” which collectively pay homage to the composer's ancestral heritage without sacrificing the distinctly American sensibility that informs his writing. The composer intended the work to present an American Negro's image of Africa as one largely based on folklore, an idealized image rooted in fancy rather than reality. He sees it first as a land of pastoral and spiritual peace, then as a place of mystery and sorrow, and finally a land tinged with superstition as influenced by American upbringing. The work is multi-dimensional, incorporating as it does European classical influences and folk and blues elements associated with America. Still infuses the evocative opening movement with tenderness and dignity; whereas a strong blues character informs the generally solemn central part, the concluding movement is buoyed by numerous dance episodes whose high spirits counter the darkness and fear associated with superstition. As she does with the Ravel and Gershwin pieces, Newkirk illuminates Still's material with an expressive performance attuned to the essence of the piece.

August 2022