Donald Macleod explores the life and music of George Walker, in conversation with his son Gregory. Today Walker’s Paris-bound, to study with the formidable Nadia Boulanger.

“Myth”, the composer Ned Rorem once wrote in an article for the New York Times, “credits every American town with two things: a 10-cent store and a Boulanger student.” He had a point. Since the founding of the American Conservatory at the Palace of Fontainebleau, an hour or so’s train journey south-east of Paris, in the aftermath of World War I, a period of study with 'Mademoiselle' had become a virtual rite of passage for aspiring young musicians from over the pond. In a career lasting nearly six decades, Nadia Boulanger taught more than 600 of them, encouraging the craft of composers as different in their outlooks as Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, Philip Glass and Burt Bacharach. Armed with a recent doctorate from the Eastman School of Music and funded by a Fulbright Scholarship, George Walker made the pilgrimage to France in 1957, staying on for a second year courtesy of a John H Whitney Fellowship. Boulanger was, he recalled in later life, “the first person to acknowledge and praise my gift for musical composition. She never told me how to write.” Nonetheless, Walker’s time with Boulanger exposed to him to the cutting edge of contemporary musical thought, and marks a watershed in the evolution of his compositional style. Inspired by an encounter with Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto, Walker’s solo piano piece Spatials is an engaging if perhaps somewhat self-conscious adventure in strict serialism; but in his spiky Variations for Orchestra and the dynamic Piano Concerto, his new researches have been fully assimilated into his own musical persona.

The Bereaved Maid
Phyllis Bryn-Julson, soprano
George Walker, piano

Sonata No 1 for violin and piano
Gregory Walker, violin
George Walker, piano

Spatials
George Walker, piano

Variations for Orchestra
New Philharmonia Orchestra
Paul Freeman, conductor

Five Fancies for clarinet and piano four hands (Theme and 5 variations)
Eric Thomas, clarinet
Vivian Taylor, John McDonald, piano

Piano Concerto (2nd mvt)
Natalie Hinderas, piano
Detroit Symphony Orchestra
Paul Freeman, conductor

Produced by Chris Barstow for BBC Wales Show less