From the archives
Andrew Mcgregor discovers Sony’s landmark set of 1970s recordings celebrating black composers
I had no idea that Columbia Masterworks had curated a Black Composers series from 19741978 (Sony 19075862152; 10 CDS). Think of the timing – just four years earlier there was still no universal suffrage for black people in the USA. The recordings were supported by the Afro-american Music Opportunities Association, and these were groundbreaking. Two of the composers are still with us, while the earliest is Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-georges, the violinist and swordsman who shared a house with Mozart and survived the Terror after the French Revolution – just. This first disc is a fine introduction to his music, from Haydnesque Quartet and First Symphony to a real rarity: a scene from one of his five operas. Paul Freeman conducts the LSO in most of these recordings; he helped pick the composers, and the high quality of the performances is largely down to him. Londoner Samuel Coleridge-taylor shares volume two with an American 20 years his junior, William Grant Still, whose Afro-american Symphony was the first symphonic piece by a black composer played by an American orchestra… in 1931. Ulysses Kay’s Markings is one of the discoveries of the set for me: a large-scale symphonic essay for the Detroit Symphony based on a book by UN diplomat Dag Hammarskjöld. Roque Cordero’s 1962 Violin Concerto for Sanford Allen, the first black member of the New York Philharmonic, is an exhilarating piece of modernism, while José Maurício Nunes Garcia’s Requiem is 35 minutes of soulful, moving meditation. José White Lafitte was a Paris-trained Afro-cuban violinist, who premiered his Violin Concerto in 1867; Aaron Rosand gives an exhilarating account of it. Two composers died just last year: George Walker, whose Lyric for Strings was played by Chineke! at the BBC Proms, and Olly Wilson, whose West African influenced Akwan mixes piano, electric keyboard and amplified strings. It’s a fascinating snapshot reminding us how far we’ve come, but also how far we still have to go in recognising the black composers of the past.