January 19, 2022
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Walker's Piano Sonatas
Walker: 5 Piano Sonatas
Steven Beck, piano.
Bridge 9554
Total Time: 53:13
Recording: ****/****
Performance: ****/****Pianist Steven Beck’s new release provides an excellent way to get a sense of the music of George Walker (1922-2018). He was one of the first of a small group of African American composers in the 20th Century to break through into the modern concert world both as a performer and composer. In the case of the former, he was one of the few composer-pianists to record excellent versions of the Beethoven “Emperor” concerto and the Brahms second concerto. More importantly, his work as a composer brought him recognition and acclaim including a Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for his work Lilacs. Walker was among the many Americans who studied with Nadia Boulanger. As the first black person to be accepted at the Curtis Institute, he would study with Rudolf Serkin and that would lead to his debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Walker is one of the few 20th-Century American composers to have written such a great number of sonatas. The five pieces on the present release provide an overview of his compositional development across a fifty year period.
The first sonata was revised in 1991, but was composed in 1953. The style has a decidedly modernist feel with interesting splashes of jazz harmonic flirtations. Heavily contrapuntal in its outer movements, the center provides a nice contrast of lyricism in a set of variations. At fourteen minutes it is the longest of the sonatas in his oeuvre. Written in 1956, the second sonata is cast in four terse movements. Here motivic development and a more expansive angular style comes to the forefront with a noir-ish Adagio movement providing a stark contrast to the preceding Presto. Both these early works feature melodic lines that seem to lie at the edge of serialism and by 1975 when he completed the third sonata, this compositional approach was beginning to appear in his music. While not quite strictly adhering to rows, the third sonata does have a harsher tone and scalar writing that is a distant cousin to Messiaen. With titles like “Fantoms”, “Bells” and “Choral and Fughetta”, the sonata is a microcosm of an almost deconstructive reality that has stripped music to its barest components. Perhaps Walker is also asking his listener to consider what music is in this work as well with its small outbursts seeming to connect to the frustrations of the age. The fourth sonata was written in 1984 and is comprised of just two lengthier movements. In many respects, this work feels like a reflection of Walker’s sense of place in American music with veiled nostalgic gestures that hearken back to his earlier modernist style and even a quotation of a spiritual. The latter is a bit rare in his work, but here “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child” seems to add a sense of poignancy to the piece with deeper, personal meaning in what is an otherwise more abstract piece. Only one brief self-contained movement greets us in Walker’s final sonata from 2003.
Walker’s music is quite accessible with its modernist harmonic ideas providing an easy point to enter into his music. There is a great sense of drama and a great deal of interesting contrapuntal writing that propels the music forward with great energy. Slower sections can provide a rather reflective moment that allows for briefer repose as these harmonies expand. Walker’s focus on motivic components provides a further component that helps make the pieces a bit virtuosic as these segments need to be brought out. Beck handles these aspects quite well with crystal clear articulation and just enough pedal for the slower movements to bring out the harmonic clusters.
Steven Beck’s performances move us carefully through these stylistic shifts in Walker’s style while also playing in a way that helps us hear the overlapping contrapuntal writing that appears across all five works. Each of these sonatas are spread across Walker’s life and their intricate sound feel like they are also hearkening to the composer’s experiences at some deeper, abstract level. Beck’s performance bring these threads out well and his performance is captured in excellent sound. He reminds us that it is more than time to bring George Walker’s music to a greater public with pieces that sit alongside any of the other great 20th Century American piano music.