Walker Piano Sonatas Nos 1-5 Steven Beck (piano) Bridge BRIDGE 9554 53:13 mins
When George Walker died in 2018 at the age of 96, his obituaries made plain the trailblazing nature of his long career. His life was packed with firsts. To name a few, he was the first African-American pianist to give a recital at New York’s Town Hall; the first black graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music; the first black composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. His 100-or-so works include five remarkable piano sonatas, which make an important contribution to the 20th-century keyboard repertoire.
Steven Beck’s performances do them proud, bringing together all five pieces in one recording for the first time. Spanning much of the composer’s creative life, from 1953 to 2003, the sonatas offer a superb introduction to Walker’s music. It’s possible to point to this or that influence – European modernism, serialism, folk songs – yet these ingredients are always forged into something new. A formidable pianist himself, Walker was a musician who valued technique and tradition: his distinctive musical voice has real integrity that repays deep listening.
His first major piano work was the Sonata No. 1, an angular and tender piece that is as bracingly uncompromising as anything by Stravinsky. Lucid and lean, the Sonata No. 2 explores the intervallic relationship of the third. Atonality hangs in the air of Sonata No. 3, a Webern-like clarity of thought. The striking second movement, ‘Bell’, consists of a single chord repeated 17 times. The Fourth is condensed and astringent, yet Walker goes a step further with the Fifth. The journey ends with a single movement: concise, strong and utterly individual.
Rebecca Franks
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