As the subtitle indicates, this 2022 release is a reissue of a 1997 album by violinist
Rachel Barton Pine. At the time, the idea of an album of music by Black composers was more unusual than it is in 2022, but what strikes the listener is how fresh the music here remains. One major change has been made: the deletion of the Violin Concerto No. 4 in D major of the Chevalier Meude-Monpas, who, it turned out, was not of African descent at all (his appellation "Le Noir," believe it or not, referred to his horse). However, everything else is still vital. A good deal of music by Joseph Bologne (or Boulogne), Chevalier de Saint-Georges, has surfaced since 1997, but little of it is as effective as the Violin Concerto in A major, Op. 5, No. 2. Sample the sizable first movement, whose violin part is both elegant and virtuosic. This work could easily be programmed with
Mozart's violin concertos and not suffer by comparison. Still rarer is the Violin Concerto in F sharp minor by
José White Lafitte, a Cuba-to-France transplant whose mother was Afro-Cuban. This is a fine, colorful score, written for the use of the composer-violinist himself, in the vein of
Sarasate. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor is represented by a deeply soulful Romance for violin and orchestra in G major, and the Meude-Monpas work is replaced by a concerto that was unknown when
Barton Pine made her earlier recording and was discovered only in 2009:
Florence Beatrice Price's Violin Concerto No. 2. This work, from late in
Price's life, is ingeniously structured, with multiple themes varied across its four sections; it contains the African American vernacular influences that marked
Price's earlier work, but they are somewhat muted. This work has not often been played or recorded.
Barton Pine's performances have a mood of commitment, and she is a capable stylist in Romantic idioms. The album remains essential for collections of music by composers of African descent. ~ James Manheim