Lilacs: The Music of George Walker
Summit Records 274 (2000)
George Walker (b. 1922)
has a website at http://georgetwalker.com/
and is featured at
AfriClassical.com
Dominique-René de Lerma:
HOMAGES FROM BILL McGLAUGHLIN,
The theme for Exploring music
for the week starting 18 August is homage: Monday from Beethoven;
Tuesday from Mozart, Reger, and Tchaikovsky; Wednesday from Russian
composers; Thursday to British royals; and Friday from Bruckner, Berio,
Brahms, and Johann Strauss. Although the repertoire holds no surprises,
even when dealing with old friends whose visits are very frequent, the
performances are consistently splendid. However did we really need to
hear Beethoven's Mondschein sonata again? No, not really, but
Garrick Ohlson restored it to Beethoven, out of the bourgeois clutches
of the casual music lover. And there are recycled repertoire whose
previous airings are all to fresh in our memory, such as Hindemith's Trauermusik. As for Tchaikovsky's tribute to Mozart, it does no credit to the Austrian.
If this is only the first installment, we may yet hear the Pulitzer-prize winner, Lilacs,
with Walt Whitman's tribute to Lincoln by George Walker (Summit Records
DCD 274, 2000), or Dr. Walker's memorial to his grandmother, Lyric (Cedille CDR 900000 061, 2001 -- 5:17), and on this same CD is Adolphus Hailstork's Epitaph for a man who dreamed; In memoriam Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (7:37), also on Music & the Arts CDR 0497, 1997. In memoriam Sojourner Truth, by Gary Powell Nash is on Albany TROY 104 from 1993 (11:40). There is Olly Wilson's Sometimes on New World Records 80423-2, from 1992 (17:20). There exists no recording unfortunately of James Furman's I have a dream or of David Baker's Black America -- both powerful cantatas in memory of Dr. King, but we do have Baker's Through this vale of tears; In memoriam Martin Luther King, Jr. on CRI CD 823, 1999. William Grant Sill's And they lynched him on a tree is available on Collins Classics 14542 from 1996.
I've only seen the second edition of Anthony McDonald's A catalog of music written in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.,
but the third edition was issued by Scarecrow Press in 2011, and runs
198 pages. Here is a rich register of works that a inform performers
and radio stations who wish to commemorate the civil rights leader.
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Dominique-René de Lerma
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