AMERICAN COUNTERPOINTS | THE ARTS DESK - REVIEW

Classical CDs: Cowhorns, gloves and marching drums

Contemporary sounds from Norway, plus rediscovered American and a brass dectet
by: Graham Rickson | May, 2024

Julia Perry’s three-minute Prelude for Strings popped up on my iPod whilst driving, the music so striking that I was compelled to pull over and find out what it was. Perry (1924-1979) is ripe for rediscovery. She came from an affluent black family who encouraged her musical aspirations, Perry initially combining composing with teaching. She was awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships in the early 1950s which enabled her to travel to Europe and study with Dallapiccola and Nadia Boulanger, a period when her music became bolder and more eclectic in style. Health issues slowed Perry’s output in later years and the bulk of her output is still in manuscript form. Along with an arresting, spiky one-movement symphony scored just for basses and violas, the main discovery here is Perry’s Violin Concerto, brilliantly played here by Curtis Stewart. Accompanied by James Blachly’s Experiential Orchestra. Perry’s bright, translucent scoring makes what might seem uncompromising on paper sound enthralling. Think Berg or Hartmann. Perry sustains her large single-movement structure brilliantly, and the dizzying final pages both celebratory and fiercely dissonant. You can’t imagine the work receiving better advocacy than it gets here, Stewart and Blachly presenting the concerto as if it’s a repertoire work.

We also get music by Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson (1932-2004), born in New York to a musically talented mother who named her son after the black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Perkinson’s long career took in collaborations with Marvin Gaye and Harry Belafonte besides conducting, teaching and writing music for films, tv and ballet. Listen blind to his Sinfonietta No. 1 and you’d think you were hearing a 20th century English string piece by the likes of Tippett or Lennox Berkeley; this is superbly crafted and engaging music with a dizzying, motoric finale. Perkinson’s We Who Seek makes for an apt closer, a remix of Perry’s hymn “Ye Who Seek the Truth”, heard earlier on the disc. Hymn fragments jostle with snatches of the violin concerto recording and a voice intoning the hymn lyrics, bringing us back into the 21st century with a jolt.