ジョージ・ウォーカー: ピアノ・ソナタ全集

ピューリッツァー音楽賞を受賞した米国の作曲家、ジョージ・ウォーカー(1922-2018)のピアノ・ソナタ全集。
ウォーカー作品のCDは多いが、ピアノ・ソナタ5曲を1枚に収録したCDはこれが初めてかもしれない。1953年(1991年改訂)の第1番から2003年の第5番まで、作風はいくらか異なれど、ウォーカーのセンスの良い響きが楽しめる。
スティーヴン・ベックはニューヨークを拠点とするピアニスト。米国の現代の作曲家の作品を得意としている。
東武ランドシステム

George Walker had a long career and perhaps inevitably attracted the "Dean of African American Composers" moniker, but it is also true that as his successors have gained traction, his own music has been somewhat less often heard. The Albany label has done yeomans service in documenting his work, but this beautifully played (and beautifully recorded at Oktaven Studio) set of Walkers piano sonatas by pianist Steven Beck is especially valuable. The sonatas trace Walkers development as a composer, from a sort of post-Copland style through an approach to serialism (he only rarely adopted it wholesale, but the mark of Webernian economy is all over the second and third sonatas here), back to a broader free atonality deepened by rigor. Walker generally resisted the use of African American vernacular material in his essentially modernist style, but he might then introduce it when it is least expected, in entirely original ways. Listen to the Ivesian quotation of Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child in the second movement of the Piano Sonata No. 4, surrounded by other material. Sample Becks treatment of the brief Piano Sonata No. 2 (Walkers dissertation submission at the Eastman School of Music), entirely accessible in its extended tonality and marked by extreme economy; Beck gives it the proper dry, gliding quality. Anyone interested in this giant of African American classical music but not knowing where to start could easily choose this release.