Many listeners are familiar with the excellent Witness series issued on Collins Classics in the 1990s. Its mission was to "showcase music of trailblazing African American composers", with a particular focus on choral works, but with a substantial inclusion of instrumental/orchestral pieces as well. Originating from concert programs presented in the Minneapolis, Minnesota area in the early 1990s by conductor Philip Brunelle and his then-named Plymouth Music Series (now VocalEssence), Witness and the subsequent recordings brought to greater public attention the work of "Harlem Renaissance" composers of the 1920s and '30s, extending into the modern era with a disc devoted to "Music of today's black composers". Along with Clarion's reissue this month of those first three discs (with new packaging and disc titles) comes this brand new release--the long-delayed completion of the original four-disc project.

The disc's title reflects the blues/jazz-oriented flavor of some of the selections, notably the Hall Johnson choral arrangement of William Handy's Saint Louis Blues, led by soprano Jearlyn Steele's exuberant and colorful solo. Edmund Thornton Jenkins contributes an extraordinary piece of orchestral writing--Charlestonia: Folk Rhapsody for Orchestra No. 1--whose evocation of a time and place in the black South both predates and foreshadows the premise for Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess. It deserves widespread inclusion on concert programs. Likewise, James P. Johnson offers a work for piano and orchestra--Yamekraw: A Negro Rhapsody--that "celebrates a black community on the outskirts of Savannah" and not only reminds us of Gershwin's own Rhapsody (written three years earlier) but again draws our attention to the significance of black experience and character as vital material for artistic expression of American life.

The majority of the rest of the disc is devoted to choral pieces by Harry T. Burleigh--O Southland; Ethiopia's Paean to Exaltation--and Nathaniel Dett, whose Listen to the Lambs is one of the classics of African-American music. Dett's The Chariot Jubilee, an extended choral work based on the spiritual Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, is another impressive attention-grabber, as is the closing a cappella Ave Maria, also by Dett. This last piece, written for a competition in 1914, shows an assured sensitivity to the text and a commanding grasp of choral technique--qualities that should confirm its presence in the repertoire of competent choirs everywhere.

The program, which includes performances of works not available anywhere else, makes essential listening for all choral music fans. The repertoire is not only historically important but also is of high musical value. The choir sings with a rich, full-bodied, full-vibrato-ed American sound that's very well-balanced and warm-toned. The ensemble technique is superb, the podium leadership exemplary. My only complaint is an oddly focused recording perspective that skews balances between solo instruments and voices and occasionally dulls the impact of the larger choral/orchestral forces. Overall, this doesn't prove a major drawback--the musical values are too great--and we're left in grateful appreciation for the forces behind a project that gives world-class treatment and attention to these deserving scores. Don't miss this.

—David Vernier

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This series of four CDs is enjoyable – no question about that – but in the process offers an extraordinary educational potential. The conductor has shown the insight of a highly attuned historian, who can put musicologists out of business as he surveys the African American musical scene of the past century, selecting works of unquestioned historical importance such as one reads about but suspects will never be heard. This is balanced with works of genuine merit, no matter how tentative were the times.

Philip Brunelle is based in the musically rich twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, but his frequent engagements carry him to South America and Europe. While he is billed as a choral conductor, he is as at home with an orchestra as before the keyboards of the piano or organ. His concerts, which he founded in 1969 as the Plymouth Music Series, addresses a repertoire not scheduled by the area’s eponymous orchestra, but does speak to the various ethnic communities. Their work is not confined to the formality of the concert hall, but is shared with school children (The Twin Cities, with a population under 4000,000, have an unusually diverse population. About 10% are Chippewa, 5% African American, and 4% each Hispanic or Asian), but VocalEssence, while celebrating these and various European heritages, closes any gaps that might exist in multiracial perspectives.

The earliest work in this set is Diton’s Poor moaners got a home at last, from 1914. It comes from these days before the Harlem Renaissance, when songs of slave times were only gradually being accepted. Diton is not often greeted as one of the first figures who sought to make legitimate these precious melodies from the previous century, but he has securely earned that position.

This was the same year as Dett’s Listen to the lambs for which he won $25 in a competition. In fact, this is a priceless classic, elegantly performed. When we hear Dvorák’s American quartet, we might not be reminded of the spiritual, but Dett, when a student at Oberlin, heard this work in a performance by the Kneisel Quartet, and was reminded of the music his grandmother sang during his Canadian childhood. He dedicated much of his life then towards transforming these gems into anthems and art songs.

Most unexpected within this anthology is quite possibly Charlestoniana (1917), an early work by the son of the founder of Charleston’s Jenkins Orphanage (that produced, for example, Cat Anderson). The composer was yet a composition student in Europe, dying only nine years later in Belgium, suggesting we should look not just at New York, Chicago, or even the U.S. for roots of the Harlem Renaissance. Here was a talent and an ambition that was cut too short for its full flowering. The reconstruction by the Australian Vincent Plush involved preparing a concordance of several unfinished drafts, held, like all of Jenkins’ extant works, by the Center for Black Music Research in Chicago.

Chronologically next was Burleigh’s O Southland (1919), the text by James Weldon Johnson. It was two years later that Burleigh wrote Ethiopia’s paean to exaltation. The text was by a former slave from North Carolina, Anna Julia Haywood Cooper, who was to earn her Ph.D. in 1925 from the Sorbonne.

In 1920 was the première of Dett’s The chariot jubilee, which very likely was the first instance of the expansion of a spiritual (Swing low, sweet chariot) into a motet (to be followed in 1930 by his oratorio, The ordering of Moses, his graduate thesis at the Eastman School of Music). This was the same year as his Ave Maria, written for his chorus at the Hampton Institute in Virginia.

Florence Price’s Moon bridge comes from 1927, the text by Mary Rolofson Gamble (of the Gamble Hinged Music Company) and Song for snow from 1930, a tribute to her days in Maine (text by Elizabeth Coatsworth). These are two quite innocuous works for chorus. Price is well remembered as a piano teacher from her days in Chicago, where one of her young students was Ned Rorem.

Hall Johnson’s setting of the 1914 Handy hit was prepared for the 1939 film, The best of the blues, at a time Johnson had been writing and conducting for Hollywood, where he and his chorus migrated from New York to participate in the film version of The green pastures. The performance, not overly refined, cannot fail to elicit smiles from the listeners. This is a joyously, self-assured work.

—Myrtle Hart Society