American Counterpoints
Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson (1932-2004)
Louisiana Blues Strut (A Cakewalk) (2001)
Sinfonietta No 1 (1956)
Julia Perry (1924-1979)
Prelude for Strings [arr. from Prelude for Piano (1946) by Roger Zahab]
Symphony in One Movement for violas and basses (1961)
Ye, Who Seek the Truth (1952) [arr. strings by Jannina Norpoth]
Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (1968)
Curtis Stewart (b. 1986)
We Who Seek
Curtis Stewart (violin)
Experiential Orchestra/James Blachly
rec. 2023, DiMenna Center for Classical Music, New York
Reviewed as download from a press preview
Bright Shiny Things BSTD0200 [50]
This disc celebrates the legacy of two important yet underperformed Black composers of the post-war period, Julia Perry and Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson. The most significant work here is the premiere recording of Perry’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra. This project, ‘American Counterpoints’, has been jointly curated by James Blachly, director of the New York-based Experiential Orchestra, and the violinist and composer Curtis Stewart. The release is timed to coincide with Perry’s centenary in 2024, and, despite the short duration of the disc, offers many pleasures.
Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, born in 1932, enjoyed significant success in film and television music, in jazz, and in popular music, in addition to his achievements as a composer, conductor, and teacher. (Rather obviously he was named after the British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.) We get only a taste of Perkinson’s ingeniously crafted music on this disc, and both works are reasonably familiar: an early neoclassical work for strings and a late work for solo violin that has become a popular encore piece.
The disc opens with Louisiana Blues Strut (A Cakewalk), performed by Stewart. The work, written in 2001, was originally intended as an addition to his solo violin suite from 1972, Blue/s Forms, but in the end, was left as a virtuosic standalone display piece. The challenge is to balance the ‘strut’ (which implies a certain metrical precision to make the syncopation work) and the ‘blues’ (which allows for greater freedom). Compared to other performers of Louisiana Blues Strut that I’ve heard (Randall Goosby, Augustin Hadelich, Rachel Barton Pine), Stewart is extremely free rhythmically and a little short on ‘strut’; his performance on his 2021 album Of Power was, I think, more straightforward and more effective.
Perkinson’s early Sinfonietta no. 1 for string orchestra, from 1956, is a well-crafted, rhythmically propulsive, three-movement neoclassical work, sharing the sound worlds of Hindemith, Bloch, Barber, and Copland. Not surprisingly it is performed with some frequency: in the last couple of years, I’ve heard performances from the Minnesota and Philadelphia Orchestras. Blachly and the Experiential Orchestra strings come off very well here, in an energetic and convincing performance.
Both the Sinfonietta no. 1 and the Louisiana Blues Strut, by the way, can also be found on a 2005 Cedille release that is the best single-disc exploration of Perkinson’s music, ‘Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson: A Celebration’ (Cedille CDR 90000 087, review).
The other major composer highlighted on this disc is Julia Perry, who, sadly, remains a cypher. Perry was much acclaimed in the 1950s and early 1960s, and she enjoyed a great deal of success both in the U.S. and Europe, but for reasons of increasingly poor health and no doubt prejudice she and her music fell into obscurity. According to Helen Walker-Hill’s From Spirituals to Symphonies, none of Perry’s works written after 1963 was ever performed. A debilitating stroke in 1970 further isolated her, and she died in 1979 at age 55, with dozens of works unpublished, in copyright limbo, and in various states of performability, and with many other works lost. In recent years, there has been significant progress in sorting out these issues, but it will be quite a while before we have a full picture of Perry’s output.
Three of Perry’s compositions were recorded around 1960 by CRI (Composers Recordings, Inc.) and these have remained at least somewhat in the public eye: A Short Piece for Orchestra, from 1952 (revised in 1965 as Study for Orchestra), and performed quite frequently; the powerfully intense Stabat Mater for mezzo-soprano and strings from 1951, which was recently performed to great acclaim at the New York Philharmonic (November 2023); and a fascinating 1960 chamber work for percussion, Homunculus C.F.
The major work on the new release is the premiere recording of Perry’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, completed in 1968. Though Perry prepared a full score, orchestral parts, a piano reduction, and a program note, the concerto nevertheless required significant reconstruction before it was performance-ready, a project that occupied composer and violinist Roger Zahab, who gave the premiere performance in 2022 at the University of Pittsburgh, for several decades. On the new recording, both soloist Curtis Stewart and the orchestra perform admirably, some vagaries of intonation notwithstanding.
The concerto is a single movement of twenty-plus minutes, with a number of sections in alternating tempos, fairly seamlessly connected; contrasts of texture and rhythmic are generally minimized. Perry’s orchestration is fairly sparse, and her use of the orchestra sounds rather less bold and confident than in the contemporary (1965) Study for Orchestra (the revision of her earlier Short Piece for Orchestra); nor does Perry appear particularly interested in varying the density of the orchestral fabric.
The concerto opens with an extended improvisatory solo passage with treacherous and brutally exposed major 7ths, which return periodically as connecting material. The solo violin writing is generally idiomatic and interesting throughout, and, as in Perkinson’s Strut, Stewart again displays a tendency toward rhythmic freedom.
Perry makes frequent use of short, repetitive rhythmic patterns with shifting subdivisions that function as motivic cells, in lieu of memorable thematic material, and, to my ear, these passages tend to meander. There is a lovely middle section in which the soloist in long notes is accompanied by harp with interjections from strings and winds. This is followed by a brief scherzo-like arpeggiated passage, and eventually, a build-up to an impressive and extended cadenza and conclusion.
Perry’s 1961 Symphony in One Movement, for violas and basses, also receives its first recording, I believe. This eight-minute work features angular melodic shapes and lovely dark sonorities (of course). In the middle, rhythmic activity comes to a halt, as if time is paused; eventually, activity resumes, though somewhat tentatively. The performance is excellent.
The disc contains two arrangements of shorter works by Perry as well. The 1946 Prelude for piano (revised in 1962), reasonably familiar since it was republished in a 1992 anthology (Helen Walker-Hill, ed., Black Women Composers: A Century of Piano Music, 1893-1990), has been arranged by Roger Zahab as Prelude for Strings. To my ear, the lush (and underarticulated) string sonorities are attractive, but the piano original is preferred, since that instrument’s percussive attack allows the crunchy extended tonality and the repeated descending melodic gesture to emerge more effectively. Finally, there is a lovely string arrangement by Jannina Norpoth of Perry’s lyrical religious hymn ‘Ye, who seek the truth.”
The release concludes with an ‘electro-symphonic kaleidoscope’ by Curtis Stewart, in which he combines samples from the Perry hymn arrangement and other works on the disc with electronics, spoken text, solo violin, and hip-hop, in a remix-type exploration of the musical truths of Perry and Perkinson. Quite interesting, but also somewhat out of place.
This well-performed release expands our understanding of Perry, in particular. The disc is very short (50 minutes), and our enjoyment would have been enhanced with additional music by both composers. Greater attention to the booklet contents would also have been welcome. Biographical sketches of Perry and Perkinson are included, but other than Perry’s not particularly helpful program note on the concerto, and Stewart’s enigmatic paragraph on his contribution, the other works are not discussed.
Jeffrey Hollander
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