George Walker: Five Piano Sonatas (1953–2003)
Bridge Records

Five Piano Sonatas is invaluable both for collecting all of the sonatas George Walker (1922-2018) wrote for piano into a single volume and for the sterling interpretations given them by Steven Beck, a Juilliard School alumnus and dedicated performer of contemporary music. The pianist honours the American 20th-century composer with exemplary readings of these stylistically diverse pieces, which while technically challenging are never less than musical. These probing examinations of the sonata form reflect the measure of Walker's musical command and how deeply he'd absorbed the writing of his contemporaries and those preceding them.

Marked by lucidity and sophistication, his work deserves to be better known, especially when his accomplishments are taken into consideration. Among his distinctions, he was the first African American composer to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music and the first to be accepted to the Curtis Institute of Music and study with Nadia Boulanger. Certainly there is much to examine, given that he produced more than ninety published works. The piano sonatas, especially when their writing spans five decades, do, however, offer a fine representative sampling of Walker's compositional world. Produced by Beck and performed on a Steinway, the album was recorded in February 2021 at Oktaven Audio in Mount Vernon, a studio setting conducive to recordings of exceptional clarity and resonance.

In the release's liner notes, Ethan Iverson—no slouch himself in the piano department—writes, “Nobody fought the idea that a black composer should sound like a ‘black composer' more than Walker—meaning that they should directly reference African American vernacular styles.” Consistent with that, the writing in these works transcends colour and race, Walker's material impressing for the quality of its musical invention and clarity of vision. Admittedly, they're not easy to pin down: they're chromatic yet also grounded in tonality, complex in construction but accessible, and often rhythmically driven yet also marked by sudden changes in metre. While a movement away from tonality can be discerned over the course of the five pieces, it's hardly unidirectional.

Each has memorable things to offer. The first, composed in 1953 and revised in 1991, captivates instantly with its contrapuntal daring and mercurial shifts in tempo, tone, and dynamics. As arresting as the muscular framing movements are, it's the inner one that beguiles most when Walker presents six variations on the old Kentucky folk song “O Bury Me Beneath the Willow,” all rendered with great delicacy and tact by Beck. Here we witness in a single work the ease with which Walker's music straddles modern and earlier traditions. The four-part second sonata (1956) revisits the theme-and-variations idea, this time at the work's beginning. Compared to the treatment in the first sonata, they're handled with dispatch in the second, with ten squeezed into two-and-a-half minutes in Beck's rendering. As fleeting as it is nimble-footed, the “Presto” paves the way for the much darker “Adagio” that follows, its oppressiveness alleviated by the comparative lightness of the closing “Allegretto tranquillo.”

A dramatic engagement with dissonance and atonality characterizes the third sonata, which arrived almost two decades after the second and underwent revisions in 1996. That shift granted free rein to Walker's explorative impulses in the three movements, with the second, “Bell,” particularly audacious for the way he attempted to integrate the sound of a church bell heard in Italy into the tapestry by having a single chord voiced seventeen times. Written in 1984, the fourth sonata sees the dust settle for a two-part work, with both movements boldly oscillating between melodic explorations and tonal shadings. Similar to the inclusion of “O Bury Me Beneath the Willow” in the first sonata, a refracted reference to “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” helps impart a personal and grounding character to the work's second part. Another change-up occurs when 2003's fifth sonata, written when Walker was eighty, assumes the form of a five-minute single-movement work. Executed eloquently by Beck, the piece is alternately lyrical and energized and, as has been noted by others, in character is reminiscent of Messiaen.

Despite the expansive terrain traversed, Walker's compositional voice comes vividly into focus as the recording advances. The impression created is of an artist articulating his own personal vision after having internalized ones by those before him. His likening of his compositional process to “discovery,” as he did in a 1987 interview with radio host Bruce Duffie, is telling. We witness in the sonatas an artist pursuing particular directions and exploring tangents in response to the internal logic of the material. It's easy to visualize Walker, a virtuosic keyboard player in his own right, at the piano methodically testing out possibilities while bringing these gripping pieces to completion.

February 2022