Albany Records Troy1447 (2013)
On December 20, 2013 AfriClassical posted: New Albany CD: George Walker's 'Mass' & 'Psalms 96 & 117' by Baltimore Symphony Orchestra & Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 2, Op. 83 by George Walker, Piano
Please see review below by James Manheim of two George Walker recordings with November 12, 2013 release on Albany Records.
This historical release combines a pair of live performances given
more than 20 years apart, with no indication in the booklet of how they came
into the hands of the Albany label or who thought they should be put together,
except for a note stating that the album is offered in memory of Dr. Nathan
Carter, director of the Morgan State
College Choir in Maryland. That group is heard in George Walker's
Mass, whose 1977 premiere performance, along with a pair of short psalm
settings, is reproduced here. The Mass is a grand work, not often heard, and it
presents plenty of problems for the chorus and soloists; a famous choir among
those of the historically African American institutions in the U.S., they
deserve credit for surmounting Walker's
challenges. Cast in dense extended tonality of the composer's later idiom, the
Mass is notable for its dark, imposing treatment of the text. The real find
here is the performance of the Brahms Piano
Concerto No. 2 in B flat major, Op. 83, Walker's
degree recital March 1, 1956, at the Eastman College of Music, conducted by Howard Hanson at
the helm of the Eastman
Philharmonia. It is quite an extraordinary reading, urgent and
commanding, at a time when the concert might have brought out the police not
too much farther south. The opening movement is so exciting that the
well-trained Rochester audience can't help but applaud at its end. This is
really a collectors' recording; the sound is no great shakes (although the
concerto is reasonable for a 1956 live recording). But you owe it to yourself
to hear the young George Walker play Brahms;
ten years later he might have become primarily a pianist rather than a composer
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