Kellen Gray And The RSNO Release 'African American Voices II'; First Commercial Recordings Of Music By Margaret Bonds, Ulysses Kay, & Coleridge Taylor-Perkinson

Kellen Gray has reunited with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (RSNO) in this second installment of African American Voices, featuring the first commercial recordings of three landmark orchestral pieces.

African American Voices II includes Margaret Bonds' Montgomery Variations (1964), Ulysses Kay's Concerto for Orchestra (1948), and Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson's Worship: A Concert Overture (2001) and will be released worldwide on Linn Records on October 13, 2023 (digital) and October 20, 2023 (CD).

The album follows Gray's 2022 recording with the RSNO, African American Voices I, which was praised for its “finesse and sensitivity” in a five-star review by Diapason, and includes William Levi Dawson's Negro Folk Symphony (1934), William Grant Still's Symphony No. 1 (1930), and George Walker's Lyric for Strings (1946/1990).

Kellen Gray was the Assistant Conductor at the RSNO from 2021 to 2023. The Scotsman gave his Royal Scottish National Orchestra subscription debut four stars. Of the same performance, Vox Carnyx: Scotland's Voice for Classical Music and Opera reported, “he unfolded the smooth, mellifluous contours with patience and understanding.” His recent and upcoming engagements include the Philharmonia Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra, English National Opera, Chineke! Orchestra, Orchestra of St. Luke's, Philadelphia Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, and many more.

Gray has earned a reputation as a versatile and imaginative artist through his diverse array of traditional and experimental programming, thrilling performances, and provocative multimedia concert experience curation.

He currently serves as Associate Conductor of the Charleston Symphony, where, as a champion for African-diasporic composers, he founded and curates the Symphony's Project Aurora, a programming and performance initiative aiming to illustrate the richness of African-American arts and culture as equally important to its European equivalent. He is also Assistant Editor and Conductor Liaison for the African Diaspora Music Project.

Kellen Gray is a native of South Carolina and credits the many folk music styles of the southeastern United States as his earliest and most impactful musical influences. He learned folk music by rote, in church and in his local community, including from the Gullah people  – direct descendants of West Africans enslaved in the United States in the Lowcountry and Sea Island regions, who have preserved many of their musical traditions.

Though most known for his mastery of the works that feature American folk idioms, his performances of other folk-based composers such as Béla Bartók, Manuel de Falla, and Ralph Vaughan Williams root from the same passionate pursuit of authenticity.

This musical background has informed Gray's approach to the music on African American Voices I and II. “I think the music of our earliest years leaves a lasting impression on all of us,” he says. “Some of my first memories are clapping and singing in Sunday morning choirs, on the school yard, or in the grass of the backyard. Whether it was spirituals, juba, or rags, the most important element was that the music was performed with the utmost expression and aimed to make the listener truly feel something.

In our rehearsals I sang the songs on which the Bonds and Perkinson are based with the syncopated Gullah rhythms we'd clap and stomp on Sundays mornings. It was most important to us to perform these pieces in a way that would feel authentic to those of us who have performed the source material all our lives.”

Watch the Album Trailer: 

Margaret Bonds' Montgomery Variations was rediscovered in 2017 and is her only purely orchestral work not lost after her death. The piece chronicles the first decade of the Civil Rights Movement and was written after Bonds' visit to Birmingham, Alabama on a concert tour with baritone Eugene Brice and the Manhattan Melodaires.

The seven-movement piece is a programmatic theme and variations on the spiritual “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me.” It begins with the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott and culminates in the 1963 Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham that killed four young girls, closing with a moving lament and benediction. Bonds dedicated the piece to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.. She never heard it performed during her lifetime.

Bonds' contemporary, the prolific composer Ulysses Kay, who was the first African-American composer to win the Prix de Rome, cultivated a neoclassical voice, as his Concerto for Orchestra exemplifies, very much in line with William Grant Still and his teacher Paul Hindemith.

As musicologist Gayle Murchison explains in the album's liner notes, “Kay's music is tonal, but it freely uses chromatic and dissonant harmony and counterpoint, as it suits the musical moment. Possessing a lyrical gift, Kay favors complex and rhythmic counterpoint, layering melodies to create complex textures. His orchestrations are lush, especially exploiting the woodwind instruments. Regarding form, Kay embraced clear forms, though not always limiting himself to the forms of previous eras.”

A versatile musician, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson comes a generation later. Murchison notes, “We hear both the enduring imprint of Perkinson's involvement in the Black church in Worship: A Concert Overture and the way in which he weaves multiple stylistic elements. In this one work, we can hear a blend of Baroque counterpoint, elements of the blues, spirituals, and Black folk music, complex rhythmic interplay, Romanticism, and lyricism in his treatment of the traditional Christian doxology ,the hymn ‘Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow.' Perkinson merges the sacred hymn and the secular concert overture as he centers Black spirituality.”

All three pieces on African American Voices II were included as part of the Minnesota Orchestra's 2021 Listening Project, in partnership with the African Diaspora Music Project. They have not previously been recorded for commercial release.

About the Royal Scottish National Orchestra

The Royal Scottish National Orchestra is one of Europe's leading symphony orchestras. Formed in 1891 as the Scottish Orchestra, the company became the Scottish National Orchestra in 1950, and was awarded Royal Patronage in 1977. Many renowned conductors have contributed to its success, including Sir John Barbirolli, Walter Susskind, Sir Alexander Gibson, Neeme Järvi, Walter Weller, Alexander Lazarev and Stéphane Denève.

The Orchestra's artistic team is led by Danish conductor Thomas Søndergård, who was appointed RSNO Music Director in 2018. The RSNO is supported by the Scottish Government and is one of the Scottish National Performing Companies. The Orchestra performs across Scotland, including concerts in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee, Aberdeen, Perth and Inverness and appears regularly at the Edinburgh International Festival and the BBC Proms. The RSNO has made recent tours to the USA, China and Europe.

The RSNO has a worldwide reputation for the quality of its recordings, receiving a 2020 Gramophone Classical Music Award for Chopin's Piano Concertos (soloist: Benjamin Grosvenor), conducted by Elim Chan, two Diapason d'or awards (Denève/Roussel 2007; Denève/Debussy 2012) and eight Grammy Award nominations. Over 200 releases are available, including Thomas Søndergård conducting Strauss (Ein Heldenleben, Der Rosenkavalier Suite) and Prokofiev (Symphonies Nos. 1 and 5), the complete symphonies of Sibelius (Gibson), Prokofiev (Järvi), Bruckner (Tintner) and Roussel (Denève), as well as albums championing the music of William Grant Still (Eisenberg), Xiaogang Ye (Serebrier) and Thomas Wilson (Macdonald).

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