Listening During Covid, Part 5: New and Forgotten Repertory Brings Unexpected Delights

Musicians active in Boston, Washington DC, and Australia discover previously unrecorded gems, including works by women composers and composers of color.

The general level nowadays of musical performance has risen around the world. Well-tuned orchestras pop up everywhere, and highly capable fiddlers and keyboard-ticklers are thick on the ground.

The present review features three CD releases from the past year in which professional musicians who are primarily active in their local area bring new or long-forgotten works to our attention, including a number of world-premiere recordings. The works clearly attest to the discernment and imagination of the performers who have selected the works and put time and care into learning how to put them across. And several of the pieces will be of interest to those looking for music composed by women or persons of color. (This is installment 5 in my “Listening During Covid,” a series in which I tend to focus on works or performances that are in some way unusual.

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The Suite. The Lowell Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Orlando Cela. Navona Records NV6324. 72 minutes

Until recently, Lowell, a former mill town in northeastern Massachusetts, never had a professional orchestra. The Lowell Chamber Orchestra is supported in part by funds from the Greater Lowell Community Foundation. Concerts are held at Middlesex Community College and at the Lowell campus of the University of Massachusetts. This enables students to hear live performances without having to travel far. The Orchestra’s conductor, the Venezuelan Orlando Cela, is a noted flutist who has often performed and recorded music by recent and living composers.

The Orchestra makes its recorded debut with the present CD, entitled The Suite. It consists of four suites of more or less dancelike pieces. Two of the suites are by composers from the early eighteenth century: Telemann and Bach. The other two are by composers who are alive and active 300 years later: José Elizondo and Anthony R. Green.

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Anthony R. Green has spoken out forcefully about how unwelcome African-American composers such as himself can feel at a typical classical-music concert and, even more so, a “new music” one. (See his powerful 2018 essay “What the Optics of New Music Say to Black Composers.”) Here he brings to the “new music” table a piece intriguingly titled The Green Double: A Historical Dance Suite. It consists of two four-minute movements and, to conclude, an eleven-minute one. The first movement, “Protest Dancing,” is, he says, an imagined vision of the nineteenth-century civil-rights activist Octavius Valentine Catto “dancing in the midst of his activism.” The second movement, “Dance Reflections,” was inspired by three African-American women who each had a connection to Massachusetts and were all daring pioneers, in different ways: poet Phillis Wheatley, abolitionist Harriet Jacobs, and Mum Bett, described by Green as “the first enslaved Black person to sue for freedom and win!” (That was in the Massachusetts colony in 1780.) “Dance Reflections” is lyrical and touching, suggesting the sorrow and quiet confidence that each woman needed in her struggles.

The last and longest movement, “A Little Lite Music,” is, Green explains, a musical self-portrait, evoking “early hip-hop and classic gospel rhythms” but also bits and pieces of works from the Western art-music tradition that were important for Green’s development. I did not recognize the snippets (well, maybe a bit of Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra), but enjoyed the variety of motives passing by, over quiet recurring rhythms in the percussion.

The Green Double contains extensive passages for two flutes, very effectively conveyed by Cela and the Orchestra’s flutist, Wei Zhao. You can hear the beginning of each track on the Lowell Chamber Orchestra’s CD here [https://www.navonarecords.com/catalog/nv6324/index.html].

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912)

Pax Britannica. Robert James Stove, organ. Ars Organi 2. 59 minutes.

The organist and musicologist Robert James Stove lives in Melbourne, Australia, and has already been widely praised for his first CD, The Gates of Vienna, a collection of pieces from the German-speaking lands during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Here I am delighted to draw attention to his second CD organ recital: Pax Britannica, a collection of compositions from Victorian-era England.

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Of special interest, in view of recent calls for greater gender and ethnic diversity in musical life today, are a chorale-prelude by the composer and prominent feminist Ethel Smyth (who in 1912 ended up in prison for two months for her activism) and Melody in D by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912). Smyth’s stirring work, published in 1913, is based on a famous Lutheran tune from the mid seventeenth century (“O, du schönes Weltgebäude”). Coleridge-Taylor — who was, somewhat confusingly now, named in honor of the famous poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge — was one of England’s most accomplished composers of the late Victorian era. The son of an Englishwoman and a physician from Sierra Leone, Coleridge-Taylor was sometimes described in his short lifetime (he died at 37) by such terms as “the African Mahler.” His evident talent brought him the support of many prominent individuals, including the composers Elgar and Stanford. His secular oratorio Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast became a standard fixture for choral societies in Great Britain and other English-speaking lands up until World War II. Many of his works are being revived nowadays, and Melody in D proves to be as engaging as anything in Hiawatha; its lyrical fervor is beautifully suited to what an organ can provide.

The disc also includes three fine pieces by more familiar names: Elgar (Vesper Voluntary, no. 3), Stanford (Andante con moto, Op. 101, no. 6), and Parry (Elegy in A-flat). Indeed, all of the works on Stove’s recital held my interest, not least the longest of them: a three-movement sonata by Charles John Grey (precise date unknown, but before 1914), and particularly its gentle second-movement: Pastorale.

The organ — a 1997 Kenneth Jones located at Trinity College at the University of Melbourne — is clear and full-sounding, doing justice to the needs of each work. Stove’s performances are basically straightforward, allowing us to hear what the composer wrote, but they are also sensitively phrased, not stiffly literal.

Pax Britannica is available from the Ars Organi website or on Spotify and other streaming services. You can hear half-minute excerpts of each track here [https://www.limelightmagazine.com.au/reviews/pax-britannica-robert-james-stove/]. and read Stove’s excellent booklet-essay here. Similarly, you can hear excerpts from each track of his first CD (“The Gates of Vienna”) here. And, more good news!: Stove has just announced yet another CD, devoted to works by the French composer Alexandre Guilmant and several of his students.