Kelly Hall-Tompkins performed Florence Price’s Violin Concerto No. 2
with the Urban Playground Chamber Orchestra Wednesday night at the NYPL
Langston Hughes Auditorium. Photo: Richard Burrowes
A wide-ranging night of African-American music served up with fire and feeling by the Harry T. Burleigh Society
By David Wright
Thu May 9, 2019
To most classical music fans, the name Harry T. Burleigh is just a footnote in music history. But it’s a pretty big footnote.
As a student of Antonín Dvořák in New York in the 1890s, the
African-American singer and composer is credited with introducing the
Czech master to the “Negro” spirituals that helped shape his most
popular work, the Symphony No. 9, “From the New World.”
Wednesday night, the compact stage of Langston Hughes Auditorium at
the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black
Culture overflowed with orchestra musicians and choral singers, bent on
demonstrating Burleigh’s influence not only on Dvořák but subsequent
generations of composers.
A trio of scholars, including two founders of the Harry T. Burleigh
Society (established 2017), was on hand to interpret a program of
concert works by Burleigh, Dvořák, and the notable African-Americans
William Levi Dawson, Florence Price and William Grant Still, with the
overall title “From Song Came Symphony.”
The words “cultural appropriation” crossed no one’s lips all evening.
However, the concert’s point was, in a way, to celebrate that very
thing—the music of African-Americans becoming understood as, simply,
American.
Society officers Lynne Foote and Marti Slaten introduced all the
participants in the concert as committed to community service, social
justice, and the wider dissemination of classical music. These included
the Urban Playground Chamber Orchestra, a racially diverse ensemble
specializing in music by women and composers of color, and two
African-American vocal groups, the Brooklyn Ecumenical Choir and the
Concert Chorale of Courtney’s Stars of Tomorrow. All performed at a high
level not just of commitment, but of technique, phrasing, and
intonation.
Musicologist A. Kori Hill gave a helpful overview of the evening’s
program, touching on salient points of each piece, with recorded
excerpts. Happily, Foote, Slaten and Hill kept their remarks brief;
polished, expressive musical performances were the order of business for
the rest of the evening.
In the decades after his encounter with Dvořák, Burleigh enjoyed a
long career as a singer and an editor with the publishing firm Ricordi.
But it was his choral arrangements of spirituals that crossed social and
economic boundaries in this country and abroad. Rare is the high school
glee club singer or church chorister who hasn’t seen Burleigh’s name at
the top of an octavo score.
“My Lord, What a Mornin’,” probably Burleigh’s greatest hit, floated
in soft, rapt tones from the Concert Chorale, attentively directed by
its founder, Courtney Carey, before swinging into the more animated
middle section.
For animation, however, nothing touched William Levi Dawson’s
show-stopping arrangement of “Ezekiel Saw de Wheel,” lightning fast and
bristling with canons and quasi-instrumental effects, which earned an
ovation for the Chorale and conductor Carey.
Stealing in from the back of the auditorium, Lawrence Craig’s soulful
baritone intoning “Deep River” seemed to invoke the presence of
Burleigh himself, by way of prelude to the Burleigh-begat Largo from
Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony.
***
Florence Price’s Violin Concerto No. 2, a single movement composed in
1952 and lasting about 20 minutes, continually transformed its themes
in environments ranging from lush late-Romantic textures to more
contemporary sounds of percussion and even the marching-band sound of
snare and bass drums.
While the episodic character of Price’s score made it hard sometimes
to tell where she was going in the piece at first hearing, conductor
Cunningham brought out many felicitous details, and violinist Kelly
Hall-Tompkins was a technically assured and full-toned soloist, making
her instrument sing, slither, and skitter as the moment required.
In 1940, William Grant Still composed the cantata And They Lynched Him on a Tree to a text by Katherine Garrison Chapin, the American poet and wife of Francis Biddle, soon to become U.S. Attorney General.
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