George Walker: Sinfonia No. 1 - Single

The Sinfonia No. 1 is George Walker’s blazing opening salvo in a form that he revisited four more times over the next 32 years. Commissioned by the Fromm Foundation and premiered at Tanglewood in 1984, the two-movement score represents Walker’s talent for conjuring up stark and elemental landscapes. A form with its roots in the Italian Baroque, sinfonia means “sounding together,” yet Walker’s score is not so much a portrait of a big, happy ensemble as a collection of feisty instrument groups jostling to be heard. The piece establishes some of the trademarks of Walker’s sinfonias: tough and biting brass chords, scampering woodwind passages, and angular string themes that dart across registers. Percussion dots the terrain with rattles, pings, and jolts. The music builds to moments of great tension, but the First Sinfonia isn’t all grit and clenched fists. Walker was not a doctrinaire serialist, and, as National Symphony Orchestra (NSO) music director Gianandrea Noseda tells Apple Music Classical, 12-tone techniques are absent from this score. “The chords he uses are very complex and, I have to say, dissonant, but the way he orchestrates doesn’t make those chords sound too aggressive,” he says. The NSO doesn’t shy from the music’s theatricality, with the strings leaning into every accent and the brass giving a hearty wallop to each blocky outburst. Above all, Noseda says, Walker was a first-rate craftsman. “The gestures are very clear in No. 1,” he says. “Very solid and very identifiable within the history of the 20th-century music.”