New recording out now!

On Viola Revival, violist Jonathan Bagg and his collaborators, pianists Emely Phelps and Mimi Solomon, champion works by three significant African American composers who were not given their due during their lifetimes: Marion Bauer, Ulysses Kay, and Margaret Bonds. Each composer made significant contributions to the concert music community of the day. Bagg’s advocacy aims to facilitate more performances of these pieces on contemporary viola programs, while simultaneously enhancing and broadening that instrument’s repertoire of modern American works.

Margaret Bonds enjoyed a career as a composer and pianist in mid-century Chicago, as one of Florence Price’s most active students, and as a piano soloist. Troubled Water is an adaptation of an adaptation; Bonds originally wrote a solo piano work that was based on the Negro Spiritual “Wade in the Water” that was a staple of her touring concerts. That piece was included on her multi-movement Spirituals Suite for piano, and she later arranged it for cello and piano. It is an arrangement of that cello and piano version that we hear on this recording. Bonds treats the concept of water as an idée fixe in the setting, finding various musical ways to explore its properties. From the flowing opening keyboard accompaniment figure, through passages of cascading arpeggios, rhapsodic sequences, and blues inflected melodic figures, the connection to the soulful original melody is consistently apparent, as Troubled Water drives towards a dramatic end.

-Dan Lippel