Discographic releases devoted to Ukraine or exploring the repertoires of black composers and female composers are multiplying and relaying the trends observed in concert halls, where musical institutions now want to reflect the society in which they evolve. The disc, raking broadly and in depth, makes it possible to carry out a salutary artistic sorting.
As The duty reported last July, statistics compiled by the Institute for Composer Diversity on the repertoire of American professional orchestras in 2022, released on May 31, 2022, showed that the programming of “works by composers of color has globally increased from 4.5% in 2015 to 22.6% in 2022”.
In concert halls, the lightning reactivity has been made possible because the notion of the short term has suddenly invited itself into artistic planning due to the pandemic, allowing, for example, to respond very quickly, in the United States, to the wave of indignation raised by the murder of George Floyd in May 2020.
This trend is largely relayed by the record industry. However, as in the past, with the “baroque revolution” for example, this editorial activity gives us the opportunity to widen our field of knowledge and to discover works which can then find a legitimate place in our concert halls.
Indeed, nothing would be worse than integrating works for the sole sake of quotas and the fact of clearing one’s conscience or pleasing some “Index of equity, diversity, inclusion (EDI)” that is now appropriate to provide in certain institutions.
The disc can therefore be a guide directing judicious and artistically relevant choices, we will use two of our “Great angles” to take stock of recent releases.
The Ukraine effect
To the great fear, in the United States, of seeing sponsorships flee en masse from an “art of white colonial male tradition” to spin towards health, education and sport, added, in 2022, a real solidarity of heart towards Ukraine.
The most publicized publication is at Decca, A Concert for Ukraine of the Metropolitan Opera. Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducted, on March 14, 2022, the Ukrainian anthem, Prayer to Ukraine, of Silvestrov; Barber’s Adagio, Go pensiero; them Four last Lieder, by Strauss (with Lise Davidsen); and the Final of the Ninth by Beethoven. It is a concert of real emotion predestined for the Grammy awards, this distinction granted in classical music by an electoral college which has mostly listened to nothing from records of which it has simply “heard of good things”.
The war in Ukraine has mainly drawn attention to the great living Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov. Shocking disc number 1: Maidan, four cycles of a cappella choral works. ECM resumes here a production of the kyiv Chamber Choir dating from 2017. Soaring music of intense poetry with Orthodox roots. These lullabies of the soul (tracks 3 or 13) have become essential to us and that is why Maidan was one of our CDs of the year.
Shocking disc number 2: Requiem for Larissa. Here, Bavarian Radio and its label BR Klassik have recovered a concert from 2011. The more difficult work dates from 1999 and includes these famous echoes of the past, as in theAgnus Dei. It’s a Requiem for the composer’s wife, but a Requiem non-liturgical, a sort of “traumatic lament”. It could evoke the heartbreaks of Penderecki, but it leads to a sort of “Ukrainian Requiem” (like Brahms’s is German, but with a tenor solo) in an ending that is both poetic and ghostly haloed by immaterial sounds.
These two monuments somewhat relegate the instrumental music releases of DG, which moreover seem to be available only digitally and to listen to on demand: a new album by violinist Daniel Hope and pianist Alexey Botvinov and the compilation of Silvestrov recordings by Hélène Grimaud.
We also report at Toccata a volume 2 of the Thomas de Hartmann collection with a very large “Poème-Symphonie” of more than an hour, a kind of skilful para-Rachmaninoff, but (apart from the Andante) less distinctive and catchy than volume 1.
Go Deeper Coleridge-Taylor
When it came to instilling music by black composers into concert lineups, the three names programmers looked to were William Grant Still, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and the Knight of St. George. Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) was a Briton whose father was from Sierra Leone. He is known for The Song of Hiawathaand his music was exported to the United States.
Two monographs have recently appeared. Chandos has explored chamber music with the Kaleidoscope collective, which offers a Trio, a Quintet and one Nonette of the composer’s youth.
the Nonette is a pure gem and, overall, this disc is one of those very happy discoveries that we hope for. That said, we are in a very academic language that does not develop any particular idiom. If the goal is to show the influence of Brahms on a gifted 18-year-old student in 1893, it’s very successful.
In terms of a portrait of a composer developing his own language, the double album of the orchestra Chineke! at Universal is more in a situation with mature works:Othello Suite, African Suite, Small Suitethe concert. But the recordings during various concerts (control tapes or real recordings?) show the rough side of the ensemble playing and put the album in the category of good intentions. The comparison of the two Nonettes is cruel for Chineke! .
Much more eloquent: the Violin Concertos by Black Composers Through the Centuries, by Rachel Barton Pine, and the Encore Chamber Orchestra (concertos by Saint-George, José White Lafitte and Romance of Coleridge-Taylor), the National Orchestra of Scotland accompanying the 2e Violin Concerto by Florence Price. Despite a slightly too reverberant sound, several outstanding qualities here: Rachel Barton Pine’s instrumental class and her discernment in the choice of works. the Concerto op. 5 noh 2 of the Chevalier de Saint-George justifies his nickname of “Black Mozart”. Lafitte’s concerto (1864), which was born in Cuba, evolves somewhere between Paganini, Bruch and Wieniawski. The Romance by Coleridge-Taylor is suave and that of Florence Price (1952), which precedes her death by a year, is marked by a central passage of great tenderness.
It’s the same for african American Voices , where we find the National Orchestra of Scotland conducted by Kellen Gray in what should be the symphonic disc of “base” of any exploration of African-American music. Indeed, besides the 1D Symphony by William Grant Still and Lyric for Strings of George Walker, we find the Negro Folk Symphony by William Levi Dawson (1934, rev. 1952). Cultural historian Joseph Horowitz has written half a dozen books on the history of classical music in the United States. In an essay titled The Soul of Black Classical MusicHorowitz considers the Negro Folk Symphony of Dawson as the forgotten American masterpiece.
One of Horowitz’s areas of study is what he calls “Dvořák’s prophecy” and the reasons why it did not come true. “I am now convinced that the future music of this country must be based on what are called ‘Negro melodies'”, wrote Dvořák at the end of the 19th century.e century. “This must be the true foundation of any serious and original school of composition that will develop in the United States. »
The failure of this path in favor of an American musical identity stemming from European roots (Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Leonard Bernstein) is, according to Horowitz, the fatal mistake that separated American culture from its true authenticity. For Horowitz, the “star system” which, in the United States, put forward orchestras, conductors and soloists rather than composers, and measured these stars against European standards and repertoire, was right. of the development of an American musical idiom.
As journalist Douglas McLennan has pointed out, it therefore remains to explore, as Yannick Nézet-Séguin did with Florence Price, the repertoire of composers of color, including Nathaniel Dett, Harry Burleigh, William Grant Still, Samuel Coleridge- Taylor, Margaret Bonds, William Dawson and George Walker.