This is the third volume of a four-CD series devoted to African-American music. The first (9/95) was based on traditional spirituals and gospels; the second (3/96) was a useful compendium of music by William Grant Still to mark his centenary; and this third volume, with a rather optimistic subtitle, fills in the picture with the work of more Black composers of several generations during this century.
Typical of the older generation is Undine Smith Moore (1905-88), who studied at Fisk University, Nashville, and thus emerges from the tradition of spirituals. There’s call-and-response in her setting of Langston Hughes’s Mother to Son; another of his poems, Tambourines to Glory, is treated as a jubilation spiritual; and We shall walk through the valley is characteristically soulful – and beautifully sung with fine choral balance.
Slow-moving diatonic harmonies are also a feature of two works representing much younger composers – Whoso dwelleth under the defence by Evelyn Simpson-Curenton and Nocturne by Adolphus Hailstork. Simpson-Curenton’s spacious consonances are impressively scored but Hailstork is better known, with a symphony recorded in the USA, and his setting of a poem by Jim Curtis is as dreamily evocative of summer as Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915. And Maria Jette’s extended solo is simply rapturous: a high point of the whole disc.
But there are some odd choices in this anthology, especially when selections are made from longer works. Three movements from William Banfield’s punningly titled Dance like the Wind, a wind quintet based on the film of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, show him to be fluent and witty in neo-classical idioms. Two solo cello movements from Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson have less scope. Joseph Jennings’s An old black woman, commissioned by the enterprising Plymouth Music Series, has orchestral accompaniment and uses a mostly conventional vocabulary to create a moving image of a down-and-out.
The final item, Images, Shadows and Dreams by the prolific David Baker, is a lightweight crossover piece, partnering the singers with a jazz group of flute, guitar, piano, bass and drums. What emerges most strongly from this surprisingly heterogeneous collection is – yet again – the choral expertise of the Ensemble Singers of the Plymouth Music Series under Philip Brunelle.R1 '9704093'