African American Voices II
Bonds: Montgomery Variations; Kay: Concerto for Orchestra; Perkinson: Worship – A Concert Overture
Royal Scottish National Orchestra/Kellen Gray
Linn Records CKD731 47:48 mins
This album is a welcome follow-up to the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (RSNO)’s well-received African American Voices of 2022. Once more under the baton of Kellen Gray, the RSNO brings terrific warmth and verve to three appealing orchestral works that span the Harlem and Chicago Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s and Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s stirring concert overture of 2001.
The album opens with Margaret Bonds’s Montgomery Variations (1964), currently the only purely orchestral work by Bonds to survive. Born in 1913, Bonds studied with Florence Price and went on to forge a powerful compositional voice that blended African-American idioms with Western classical forms. This work takes the spiritual ‘I Want Jesus to Walk with Me’ as its theme and charts events surrounding the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56 and 1963 Baptist Street Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama across its seven programmatic movements. By turns dramatic and hopeful, this is a striking piece – Gray draws forth a performance of subtlety and emotion.
Ulysses Kay’s Concerto for Orchestra (1948) is a crisply neo-classical work with great appeal. Rather than focusing on individual instruments in turn, Kay features whole families of instruments. This yields much imaginative use of texture and timbre, and showcases some exceptional playing from the RSNO, notably in the woodwinds.
Named after the British-Sierra Leonean composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Perkinson trained both in classical and jazz styles, and also cited black church music as central to his composition. Worship: A Concert Overture traverses everything from Baroque counterpoint to the blues to modernist rhythmic complexity in its exploration of the hymn tune ‘Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow’. Triumphant, lyrical and shot through with a certain steely determination, this is a fitting end to an assured and deeply felt collection. Kate Wakeling
