American Counterpoints

Perry: *Violin Concerto; Prelude for Strings; Symphony in One Movement for Violas and Basses; Ye, Who Seek the Truth; Perkinson: Sinfonietta No. 1; *Louisiana Blues Strut; Curtis Stewart: *We Who Seek

Curtis Stewart (violin); Experiential Orchestra/james Blachly

Bright Shiny Things BSTD0200

59:55 mins

Julia Perry was born in 1924 – not 1927 as her gravestone states, underlining the obscurity in which she died, aged just 55, following years of illness. Yet the American composer had studied with Dallapiccola and Nadia Boulanger under Guggenheim Fellowships, won the Prix Fontainebleau and enjoyed further successes in the US and Europe, writing prolifically until her death.

It’s an all-too familiar story regarding Black and women composers, and – like Coleridgetaylor Perkinson (1932-2004), named for Samuel Coleridge-taylor and known principally for his achievements in jazz – Perry is only now gaining recognition as a significant pioneer of American classical music.

The title American Counterpoints is accordingly bittersweet, celebrating in Perry’s birthcentenary year the prowess of both composers in interweaving quasi-tonal lines and rich textures to create distinctive and highly inventive, abstract modernist music.

They are echoed by violinistcomposer Curtis Stewart (b. 1986): compelling as the soloist in Perry’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra

(its world premiere recording) and Perkinson’s solo violin cakewalk, Louisiana Blues Strut – and as composer of We Who Seek, an electroacoustic paean to his two neglected forebears.

The piece utilises samples from Perry’s Ye, Who Seek the Truth,a choral work heard here in a lyrical

string arrangement by Jannina Norpoth. More haunting is Roger Zahab’s arrangement of Perry’s Prelude for Strings (originally for piano) – and still more luminously dissonant is her Symphony in One Movement for Violas and Basses.

All are performed with passionate commitment by conductor James Blachly’s Experiential Orchestra. But it’s Perry’s Violin Concerto and Perkinson’s Sinfonietta No. 1 which really strike home: the former superbly vivid and sometimes unsettling in its constantly changing tempos, and the latter propelled by a wonderfully intense, almost Tippett-like polyphony.

Steph Power

PERFORMANCE

RECORDING