As the first African American composer to win a Pulitzer Prize, George Walker (1922–2018) received an affirmation long overdue. By the time of the award — for Lilacs, a work for voice and orchestra, in 1996 — he had produced a considerable body of work in multiple genres and styles while remaining largely below most listeners’ radar. A 2015 appreciation in The Guardian bore the headline, “George Walker: the great American composer you’ve never heard of.”
While Walker occasionally referenced spirituals and jazz, he was wary of being pigeonholed. The “common denominator [of Black composers of his generation],” he wrote in a 1991 essay, was “not a use of black idioms but a fascination with sound and color, with intensities and the fabric of construction.”
An accomplished pianist and organist, Walker had long-standing affinity for the keyboard. A fine new Bridge label recording of Walker’s five piano sonatas, composed over a 50-year span, affirms it. Even as he migrated from the manner of Copland and Barber into atonality and serialism, Walker exhibited a bounty of melodic invention, quicksilver figurations, percolating rhythms and harmonic complexities. Underpinning it all was a structural rigor that organized his musical thoughts without straitjacketing them.
Performed with clarity and conviction by Steven Beck, the collection opens with the longest work, the 1953 Sonata No. 1. The first movement, marked Allegro energetico, introduces the composer’s distinctive flair for mining his material. A discursive yet absorbing theme is worked out in a cascading development. A brief lyrical interlude is swept away by another propulsive burst leading to a rhythmically charged climax.
In the wittily compressed second movement, Walker spins out a series of contrasting variations on a simple yet elegant folk tune. At once cryptic and incisive, the variations, some mere seconds long, range from the wispy to the percussively urgent to the patiently languid. In one fine effect, the left and right hands seem to engage in a call-and-response. This excellent work concludes with another expansive Allegro that revives material from the first movement, enriching it with deft contrapuntal maneuvers and translucent sonorities.
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