African American Voices II—Royal Scottish National Orchestra/Kellen Gray (Linn 731)
Margaret Bonds: Montgomery Variations
Ulysses Kay: Concerto for Orchestra
Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson: Worship: A Concert Overture
African American-born conductor Kellen Gray says of this series: “It was most important to us to perform these pieces in a way that would feel authentic to those of us who have performed the source material all our lives….Some of my first memories are clapping and singing in Sunday morning choirs, on the school yard, or in the grass of the backyard. Whether it was spirituals, juba, or rags, the most important element was that the music was performed with the utmost expression and aimed to make the listener truly feel something. In our rehearsals I sang the songs on which the Bonds and Perkinson are based with the syncopated Gullah rhythms we’d clap and stomp on Sunday mornings.” Margaret Bonds wrote her 1964 Montgomery Variations on the spiritual “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me.” This cri de coeur chronicles the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement, from the Montgomery bus boycott through the tragic 1963 Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing. Bonds dedicated the piece to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., though sadly never heard it performed during her brief lifetime. Ulysses Kay’s 1948 Concerto for Orchestra reflects the influence of several of his mentors – including Paul Hindemith – and is a thoroughly tonal work of the mid-20th century. In his 2001 Worship: A Concert Overture, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson combines sacred and secular music, incorporating blues in his elegant treatment of the ‘Old Hundreth,’ aka the Doxology, or as many know it, Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow. All three of the pieces on this album are commercially recorded for the first time.