![]() The orchestra sounded thoroughly rehearsed in this unfamiliar, and by no means technically easy, score. While falling just shy of the rhapsodic intensity of the Stokowski recording, Kalmar’s reading was more than sufficient to convince one of the symphony’s many merits and to regret that the gifted Dawson never went on to compose another. Nothing jumps out at you as being uninspired or superfluous. The late-Romantic idiom recalls that of Dvorak, himself influenced by African-American vernacular music. Rather than merely quoting singable tunes, Dawson elaborates them with great musical sophistication and a formal rigor that evolves organically. The symphony’s three movements, each bearing a descriptive title - “The Bond of Africa,” “Hope in the Night,” “Let Me Shine!” - draw on traditional black spirituals (which Dawson preferred to call “Negro folk-music”) for their inspiration and actual content. The Grant Parkers’ energized, fully committed performance on Wednesday night revealed a first-rate symphonic work utterly undeserving of its long neglect-a piece comparable, if not superior, in quality, to orchestral works by the much-better-known William Grant Still and the now-ubiquitous Florence Price, with whom he must have rubbed collegial elbows in Chicago.ĭawson said his composition was an attempt to convey the vernacular musical elements that had been lost when black Africans fell into bondage outside their homeland-an emotionally charged piece no white composer could have written. That recording is based on the revised version incorporating authentic rhythmic patterns Dawson gleaned from a trip to West Africa in 1952. Not until after its pioneering first recording in 1963, under Stokowski’s direction, did the Negro Folk Symphony resurface. After scattered performances in the ‘30s, the work tumbled from the radar. While on tour with the chorus in New York, he showed the manuscript of his Negro Folk Symphony to conductor Leopold Stokowski, who suggested ways in which he might expand it. In 1934, when the African-American composer was 35, Stokowski gave four premiere performances with the Philadelphia Orchestra, one of which was broadcast. The symphony was an instant success with both public and press, and by rights should have been taken up by orchestras across the land.īut it was not to be. William Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony was performed Wednesday night.ĭawson founded and directed the music school at the Tuskegee Institute whose choir he went on to make internationally famous, singing his arrangements of spirituals on which his reputation chiefly rests. The Alabama-born Dawson began work on it while studying for his master’s degree at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago, while playing trombone in the Civic Orchestra of Chicago. That neglect is astonishing, given the quality of Dawson’s only symphony and the provenance of its creation. (Mei-Ann Chen and the Chicago Sinfonietta brought Dawson’s work to the CSO’s home in 2021). ![]() ![]() The work, composed in 1934 and revised in 1952, has also completely escaped the attention of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Its centerpiece was the near-forgotten Negro Folk Symphony by American composer William Levi Dawson, never before played at the festival. Wednesday’s concert by the Grant Park Orchestra under his direction brought another such program of fascinating discoveries to the Jay Pritzker Pavilion. With about three weeks of concerts remaining for the 2023 edition of the Grant Park Music Festival-Carlos Kalmar’s penultimate season-the series’ principal conductor and artistic director is resolutely ticking the boxes of worthwhile if unfamiliar works from the diverse, and apparently bottomless, bag of symphonic repertory he is eager to share with listeners at Millennium Park. Zlatomir Fung performed Elgar’s Cello Concerto with the Grant Park Orchestra Wednesday night. ![]()
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