George Walker’s music was heard at the Mannes Beethoven Institute recently, and you can read reviews of the performances at The New Criterion and the NY Times.

I will be teaching a graduate seminar on piano music since 1945 this fall at Penn, and I plan to include one of Walker’s sonatas on the syllabus. He is a virtuoso pianist as well as an excellent composer, so his piano music is of special interest. I was intrigued to read in the New Criterion piece an explanation for the remarkable second movement of Walker’s Sonata No. 3, which is built on a single chord played played 17 times, with various dynamics and durations: it was inspired by a bell Walker heard when in residence at the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, on Lake Como.