NSO to Release Album of Walker’s Five Sinfonias

George Walker examining his second piano sonata at his keyboard (photograph by Frank Schramm, courtesy of [Integral])

This Friday the National Symphony Orchestra (NSO) will release an album of the five sinfonias composed by George Walker in a single CD. For those interested in taking a “deep dive” into this composer’s music, the new release (which was available as a digital album earlier this month) should serve as a valuable complement to the Bridge Records CD of the five piano sonatas that Walker composed between 1953 and 2003. As expected, Amazon.com has created a Web page for processing pre-orders of the new CD.

As I had observed when writing about the sonatas, Walker tended to work with relatively short durations. These can be found in both individual movements and compositions in their entirety. That brevity can also be found in the movements of the first three sinfonias. These provided him with a variety of approaches to extending his thematic inventions with exploratory approaches to sonorities. In the second sinfonia this goes as far as providing an extended solo for flute in the second of its three movements. (It may be worth noting that, unlike the four-movement second sonata, all of the sinfonias have at most three movements; and the last two are single-movement compositions.

The first of those was co-commissioned by NSO. Given the title “Strands,” it leads the attentive listener into the exploration of longer durations. Furthermore, while “Strands” still clocks in at less than ten minutes (by about a quarter of a minute), the final sinfonia, “Visions” is practically a quarter-hour in duration. Furthermore, just as Ludwig van Beethoven’s ninth symphony required choral resources, “Visions” augmented the orchestra with five vocalists: one soprano (Shana Oshiro), one tenor (DeMarcus Bolds, two bass-baritones (Daniel J. Smith and V Savoy McIlwain), and one bass (Kevin Thompson). However, the vocal work tends to involve declamation, rather than “conventional” singing. (There is also a version that can be performed without vocalists.)

As was the case with the sonatas, I feel a need to note that this new album was a “first contact” experience. Indeed, I doubt that I can say very much about how Walker’s approach to composing his sonatas had any influence on his orchestral composing (or, for that matter, the other way around). As had been the case with compositions by Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, “informed listening” involves the accumulation of multiple experiences. Personally, I would be more than delighted to encounter any one of the five sinfonias in a performance by the San Francisco Symphony; and I feel more than a little discouraged that I have no idea when such an opportunity will arise.