![]() The piano in the parlor continued to play a role in Walker’s musical development. It was a life-shaping decision: Walker, now 90, went on to become the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for music. I’m going to find a teacher for you,’ ” Walker recalled. Five-year-old George so delighted in banging on the keys that “Mother said, ‘Enough is enough. rowhouse on Sherman Avenue in Northwest Washington, in what is now considered Columbia Heights. Sinfonia no 3 (2003): another concise, tempestuous orchestral essay.While Advice is dark for the holidays (keep letters coming!), we’ll tell you about where some prominent Washingtonians call, or called, home.Īlthough neither of George Walker’s music-loving parents could play the instrument, they purchased a piano for the parlor of their home, this typical D.C. Movements for Cello and Orchestra (2012): music of vivid, expressionistic power. Sinfonia No 4, Strands (2012): a compact, 10-minute symphony. Lilacs (1996): Walker’s Pulitzer-winning setting of Walt Whitman. Lyric for Strings (1946): Walker’s most performed piece – and you can immediately hear why, with its immediacy and warmth. I’ve only, belatedly, begun my journey into his output, which also includes a large catalogue of chamber music if you haven’t already, I suggest you start now! Five essential George Walker works ![]() It’s music that deserves to be celebrated and performed in this country – his music has never appeared at the Proms, for example. While there are traces of Walker’s musical heroes – such as Hindemith and Stravinsky – in his musical language, he has created a distinctive world that is modernist and multifaceted yet richly communicative. His most famous and most performed work is from much earlier in his career, the Lyric for Strings from 1946 (originally part of his String Quartet No 1), a warmly yet unsentimentally nostalgic song for string orchestra, and that seam of lyricism is still there half a century later in Lilacs, albeit filtered through a much greater expressive richness and complexity. Walker’s recent music – like Strands, the turbulent Sinfonia No 3, or the teemingly energetic and mercurial Movements for Cello and Orchestra – has a sharp-edged clarity in its modernist dissonances and angularity, and yet you feel his essential desire to communicate with his audiences throughout.Īmid the turbulence and vivid, dissonant drama, there is always a sustaining structural line that makes Walker’s music compelling and coherent. According to the Washington Post, Walker is working on a symphony at the moment, a piece that will follow his catalogue of four Sinfonias, the last entitled Strands and composed in 2012. Photograph: Mansell/TimePix/Rex Featuresīut from interviews that Walker has given recently, including one this week in the Washington Post, it’s clear that while the story of overcoming cultural prejudice is part of Walker’s life story and is enfolded into his work, far more important to him is his ceaseless and rigorous focus on the craft and quality of the music he writes. The “Black Mozart” The Chevalier de Saint Georges takes part in a fencing match with the cross-dressing French secret agent Charles d’Eon de Beaumont. It’s fitting George Walker has honoured him in his flighty, angular, swashbuckling Foils for Orchestra: Homage à Saint George. As if that were not enough, he was also one of the most accomplished gentlemen anywhere in Europe, a famed fencer and socialite, but his music isn’t performed anything like enough now. He was also one of the era’s greatest violinists and orchestra leaders, who catalysed Haydn’s Paris Symphonies. Think of the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, the so-called Black Mozart, who composed string quartets, symphonies and concertos in the late-18th century, and who influenced Mozart in Paris – Wolfgang pilfered one of Saint-George’s ideas in his Sinfonia Concertante K364, as Chi-chi Nwanoku’s recent Radio 4 documentary revealed. Those achievements tell their own story of the prejudices, lack of opportunities, and segregated cultural life of those decades in America, and are also part of larger narrative in which black performers and composers have been silent or ignored over the decades and centuries.
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