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“I don’t see that happening,” Gregory says. “For both father and son, this is as close as it gets to a musical Cinderella story,” Gregory concludes. And he is grateful to spouse Lori Walker, his tireless accompanist in learning his father’s concerto. Looking back on his many years in Boulder, Gregory speaks with gratitude of Ozzi Lehnert, his last violin teacher and for many years music director of the Boulder Phil. (Székely was first violinist in the Hungarian String Quartet, an ensemble in residence at the University of Colorado in the 1960s. George Walker, the first African-American composer to win a Pulitzer Prize, is widely celebrated as the country’s outstanding black composer.įor the recording and the Philadelphia performance, Gregory has been loaned the $4.5 million 1718 “ex-Székely” Stradivarius, the instrument played upon which Zoltan Székely performed the world premiere of Béla Bartk’s Second Violin Concerto in 1939.
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Neemi Järvi, who conducts the premiere, will follow the concerto with orchestral excerpts from Wagner’s “Ring des Nibelungen.”ĭespite its dimensions, Gregory does not feel that the concerto is in any way a valedictory work. “I’ve never heard anything quite as massive as this,” he says.
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Walker has scored the concerto for a huge orchestra that includes harpsichord, guitar and full percussion section.Īnd Gregory notes that his father has created “a wall of adversity” in his writing for brass. “It’s dissonant, but lyric passages emerge with an energy and beauty that validates the entire composition.”Ĭomplexity of meter changes, complex rhythms and orchestration make it a challenge for the accompanying ensemble as well. “The music is unusually intense - sometimes unrelentingly so,” Gregory says. “When I got the score I looked it over to see whether there were passages that no one could be expected to perform.”Īnd his father did offer that he could take a slower tempo in some cases. “It’s a challenging work,” Gregory says of the 25-minute concerto. (In 1997 Gregory performed - and recorded - his father’s “Poème for Violin and Orchestra” with the Cleveland Chamber Symphony.)
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It was something he had to get off his chest, and of course he hoped a major orchestra would be interested in it.”Īlthough Gregory did not see the concerto until it was finished, it’s clear to him that his father wrote it with him in mind.
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“The concerto is a labor of love,” Gregory says. When we talked about the Philadelphia premiere Gregory had just returned from Warsaw, where he recorded the new work with the Sinfonia Varsovia conducted by England’s Ian Hobson. “Just a year ago I starred as Everyman with the Rocky Mountain Revels at the Boulder Theater, prancing around the stage and playing ‘Dueling Banjos’ with Longmont’s Jim Bartolin.” “I thought it was a little late in life to realize a childhood dream and appear as soloist with a major orchestra,” says Gregory, who earned a doctorate in composition at the University of Colorado and is now a member of the music faculty on CU’s Denver campus. He wrote the concerto for Gregory and dedicated the score to him. George Walker, 87 and retired from Rutgers University, is Gregory’s father. On December 10, Walker, concertmaster of the Boulder Philharmonic since 1987, will be soloist in the world premiere of George Walker’s Concerto for Violin with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Gregory Walker calls it “a Cinderella story.”