Luke Welch: Northern Magnolias: Robert Nathaniel Dett Piano Works
Luke Welch

Dedicated to the music of Robert Nathaniel Dett (1882-1943), the latest release from Toronto-based pianist Luke Welch arrived last fall, 142 years to the day after the Canadian-American composer's birth in Drummondville, now Niagara Falls. It's the fifth recording from Welch, whose earlier releases feature material ranging from canonic figures such as Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Chopin to Dett and African-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. While recordings of the former four are abundant in the extreme, ones featuring the music of the latter two are less plentiful, though that is changing as more attention is given to the works of Black composers such as Florence Price, William Grant Still, Margaret Bonds, and others. The pieces performed so splendidly by Welch on Northern Magnolias attest to the beauty of Dett's compositions, which total over 100. While they're classical, formally speaking, elements of blues, ragtime, folk, and salon music often emerge in his melodically rich pieces, the result music of immediate and undeniable appeal.

The Mississauga-raised Welch gave his first public performance at the age of seven and went on to study at The University of Western Ontario in London and Codarts University for the Arts in Rotterdam. He's won numerous awards, performed around the world as a recitalist and orchestra soloist, and was appointed to the Faculty of Piano at York University in 2024 and two years earlier the Royal Conservatory of Music Oscar Peterson Program. As a composer, pianist, organist, conductor, and pedagogue, Dett was a true multi-hyphenate. Much of his adult career was spent in the United States as a piano teacher and choir director, and Dett was also a leading figure of the National Association of Negro Musicians. His oeuvre includes piano suites, choral pieces, and an unfinished symphony, and among the recordings of his works are a 2002 set of selected choral pieces titled Listen to the Lambs and pianist Clipper Erickson's My Cup Runneth Over: The Complete Piano Works of R. Nathaniel Dett (Navona, 2015).

Recorded in May 2024 at Toronto's Jane Mallett Theatre and with Welch playing a Steinway Model D, Northern Magnolias begins with 1912's Magnolia Suite, the first of two such works on the release. Written during his first academic posting at Lane College in Tennessee, the five-part set is at times carefree, spirited, and bucolic, never more so than during its radiant opening movement “Magnolias,” the writing of which was supposedly inspired by the trees on the campus grounds. It takes mere seconds to be enraptured by the music's pastoral lilt, and the writing's so evocative one mentally conjures the nature scene. Solemn by comparison, “The Deserted Cabin” communicates a sense of desolation in its sparse flow of haunting chords. Diametrically opposed to it in mood, “My Lady Love” is jaunty, light-hearted dance music totally free of worry. Welch brings a metrically regulated treatment to the lullaby-like sway of “Mammy,” which veritably oozes warmth and affection. Its title derived from a poem of the same name by African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, the radiant finale “The Place Where the Rainbow Ends” is rhythmically robust and majestic but expansive in scope too.

Following the suite is the first of four single-movement settings, Nepenthe and the Muse (1922), which is suitably dreamy in keeping with the fact that Nepenthe was an anti-depressant drug cited in ancient Greek literature. While it's but four minutes in duration, it's substantial enough to show the range of which Dett was capable when its intoxicating character is so unlike “My Lady Love” and “The Place Where the Rainbow Ends.” Written when he was twenty, Cave of the Winds (1902) alludes to a Niagara Falls attraction and resonates with the sounds of nearby carousel rides and innocent fun. It hardly surprises that, with its march feel and bright tone, the piece has become a favourite of wind ensembles and marching bands.

In the release booklet, Dett's own notes for In the Bottoms (1913), considered the best-known of his piano works, clarify that he designed the piece to evoke scenes and moods of Negro life in the river bottoms of North America's Southern region. After a shadowy “Prelude” suggests the stillness of nighttime awakening to the bloom and promise of a fresh morning, the plaintive “His Song” might be thought to express the longing its protagonist has for a better life. The brief “Honey,” on the other hand, conveys contentment in its delighted embrace of the here-and-now, and the penultimate part, “Barcarolle,” appears as happy in its salon-styled swoon. Both are outdone, however, by “Dance,” which exudes joie de vivre in its exultant rhythmic vitality.

January 2025