Under the direction of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Philadelphia Orchestra has recorded a fair amount of music by 20th century Black American composers in recent years, winning a Grammy in 2022 for works by Florence Price and releasing the “Negro Folk Symphony” by William Levi Dawson in 2023.
The newest of these releases, “Still & Bonds – Symphonies & Variations,” includes the second and fourth symphonies by William Grant Still and the “Montgomery Variations” by Margaret Bonds.
Still’s second symphony is subtitled “Song of a New Race,” representing what he termed a totally new individual — a fusion of White, Indian and African-American, reflecting in large part his own ancestry. Still’s “Symphony No. 4” is titled “Autochthonous,” meaning indigenous, and he wrote that it speaks of the fusion of musical cultures in North America.
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The third piece on the album is by Margaret Bonds, a student and dear friend of Florence Price’s in Chicago. Bonds also became known for collaborating with the poet Langston Hughes. She composed the “Montgomery Variations” after the 1963 firebombing in Birmingham, Alabama, basing the theme and seven variations on the traditional spiritual, “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me.”
The album is available on the Deutsche Grammophon label, garnering positive reviews both for the quality of the performance and for the orchestra’s commitment to “musical justice.”
