Black Composers Series 1974-1978 —Paul Freeman, conductor (Sony 586215)
Nearly 50 years ago, CBS Masterworks made a groundbreaking series of recordings featuring the music of black composers, enlisting top-flight orchestras—the London Symphony, the Detroit and Baltimore Symphonies and Helsinki Philharmonic. Paul Freeman, then one of just a few working Black conductors of classical music, served as artistic director and conductor. Sony reissued the nine original recordings in 2019, adding a bonus disc of Symphonic Spirituals. The featured composers span several centuries and come from many different backgrounds. The earliest is Chevalier de Saint-Georges, an 18 th-century composer, violinist and swordsman born in Guadeloupe who spent most of his life in France. Disc 5 is dedicated to the Brazilian composer José Maurício Nunes Garcia and his extraordinary Requiem Mass. José White Lafitte, a Cuban virtuoso violinist-composer is represented by his Violin Concerto with soloist Aaron Rosand. The English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was famous on both sides of the Atlantic for his cantata Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, an aria from which is in this set, as is his orchestral Danse nègre. Coleridge-Taylor was an inspiration for the young William Grant Still and Still’s Afro-American Symphony, the first by a black composer to be performed by a major orchestra, is here with its strong blues influence. His ballet Sahdji and two arias from his opera Highway 1, U.S.A. are also included. Among the many other 20th-century composers featured are the Nigerian Fela Sowande (who spent his later years at Kent State University), the Panamanian Roque Cordero and the American Ulysses Simpson Kay. Three works by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer George Walker are included, his Trombone and Piano Concertos and the popular Lyric for Strings. David Baker, the renowned jazz cellist and composer, was a pupil of Janos Starker, and that’s who plays his Cello Sonata. Cleveland-born Hale Smith is represented by his Ritual and Incantations. Other composers in this collection are Olly Wilson, T. J. Anderson, Talib Rasul Hakim and Adolphus Hailstork. The bonus tenth album features Symphonic Spirituals, arrangements by Hale Smith, Donald Erb, Frederick Tillis and Morton Gould, of 12 spirituals for voice and orchestra, with a stirring narration by the African-American lawyer, member of Congress and Civil Rights leader Barbara Jordan. WCLV features this album all through February, Black History Month.