John Malveaux: NewMusicBox: Sounds Heard: George Walker—Great American Orchestral Music, Vol. 2

Albany Records Troy1178

John Malveaux of www.MusicUNTOLD.com writes:

Please see attachment for review of George Walker—Great American Orchestral Music, Vol. 2
 
Thanks
John Malveaux

NewMusicBox
By Frank J. Oteri
Published: March 29, 2010


George Walker has been composing distinctive and highly 
crafted music for seven decades. And while he has 
received scads of prestigious accolades—e.g. commissions 
from the Boston Symphony, the Cleveland  Orchestra, the 
New York Philharmonic, and the Philadelphia Orchestra,
a Pulitzer Prize, and membership in the American Academy 
of Arts and Letters, etc.—he has been far from a household 
name and much of his output has not been readily available 
on commercial recordings.

But in the past few years things have started to change, 
largely through the composer's own sheer force of will. 
Last year, at the age of 87, he completed his autobiography, 

Reminiscences of an American Composer and Pianist 
(published by Scarecrow Press). And over the past few
years he has been supervising definitive recordings of his 
music which have been issued on a series of CDs on the 
Albany label. I'm particularly drawn to the Son Sonora 
Quartet's performances of Walker's two string quartets, 
which are very different from each other, on a previous 
disc in this series. The present disc, Great American 
Orchestra Music Volume 2, is the series' latest 
installment and offers five works composed during the 
past two decades in committed performances by the 
Sinfonia Varsovia under thedirection of Ian Hobson. 
Overall the disc perhaps makes the most compelling case 
for a broader advocacy of George Walker's compositional 
output. Maybe if we had a mainstream media that
actually paid attention to a truly broad range of music, 
George Walker could  become a household name.