Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

Tuesday Haggis

Fort Smith, Arkansas is not exactly a highly-frequented oasis by classical music pilgrims but music director John Jeter and the Fort Smith Symphony are making a determined bid to put their little watering hole on the map. The Fort Smiths have just released their first compact disc called William Grant Still: Afro-American Symphony, as part of Naxos� splendid American Classics music series. The disk, which was released last week and is already number 57,742 on the Amazon charts, contains world premiere recordings of Still�s �Afro-American Symphony� (1930), �Africa� (1930) and �In Memoriam: The Colored Soldiers Who Died for Democracy� (1943). Still was born in Mississippi but spent his teenage years in Little Rock before moving East and becoming the first African-American to have his work performed by a major symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra.

The music is moderately challenging but Jeter�s players deliver lively and engaging accounts of three seminal works by America�s first great black composer. The disk was recorded at the Fort Smith Convention Center and sounds a little thin and tinny in places but that�s a minor quibble. When you encounter a cup of water in the desert you don�t complain that it�s not Perrier.

The first symphony written by the first major black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was premiered in Cornwall yesterday. Symphony in A Minor was written in 1896 but was only recently discovered. Born in 1875, Coleridge-Taylor died of pneumonia in 1912 at the age of 37. His best-known work is probably Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, composed in 1898, but that may be changing. His last work, the Violin Concerto in G Minor, Op. 80, completed the year he died has received a couple of very sympathetic recordings in the past year, most recently from violinist Anthony Marwood with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Martyn Brabbins. The concerto is an attractive work that deserves a greater audience and Anthony Marwood plays like an angel. Sure there are echos of Dvorak and Elgar but Coleridge-Taylor had a distinct voice and knew how to write music filled with memorable tunes and melodies.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Yeah, yeah, but what other way? The DaPonte String Quartet, an ensemble based in Maine began plotting their upcoming April 15 debut at Carnegie more two years ago by commissioning David del Tredici to write his first String Quartet. DaPonte members hope the 30-minute quartet, which they have performed a number of times in recent months at concerts around the country, will become their signature piece. While I�m sure money is not important to the artists who frequent these pages, the quartet cost $30,000 and was raised mainly by sponsors and fans.

posted by Jerry Bowles 4/05/2005