Friday, May 10, 2019

NewYorkClassicalReview.com: A wide-ranging night of African-American music

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


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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