William Grant Still: Symphonies Nos. 2 & 4

National Symphony Orchestra, Kennedy Center, Gianandrea Noseda

Label: National Symphony Orchestra NSO0020 via LSO Live

https://www.nationalsymphony.org/

There is something unashamedly feel-good about William Grant Still’s symphonic writing. Within moments of this new release from the National Symphony Orchestra and Gianandrea Noseda, you are carried back to the 1940s, to an America of wide horizons and big-screen romance, and you would happily stay there.

Both symphonies here belong to the stretch of Still’s career he labelled “universal”: Symphony No. 2 in G minor, Song of a New Race, and Symphony No. 4, Autochthonous.

The performances come from concerts at the Kennedy Center in Washington, the Second given in January 2022 and the Fourth in May 2023. Still’s achievement in both is to take the blue notes, bent phrases and inflections of the blues and pour them into the classical symphony’s moulds. That might read like a recipe for awkward compromise. It is nothing of the sort. Still’s real gift, the one that runs through every page here, is melody, and a sense of beauty that transcends any question of style or school.

The Second Symphony is one of the cornerstones of his output, and it shows how deftly he could fold jazz, blues and gospel into a single, coherent voice. The second movement is simply gorgeous. Woodwind solos float above a cushion of strings, and the effect is so cinematic you half expect a couple to step forward and launch into a number from a Broadway musical. The harmonies are rich, the orchestral sound ravishing, and the balance has been judged with great care: the lower strings glow warmly beneath the woodwind rather than smothering it. Each movement is shaped with sensitivity and expressive freedom before Still gathers his themes together in the finale, tying the threads with satisfying inevitability.

The music is stamped unmistakably with Still’s own identity. It tells his cultural story, and in doing so makes a distinguished contribution to the canon of American composers, a contribution that has waited far too long for this kind of advocacy.

Autochthonous means native, or sprung from the soil, and the Fourth Symphony is every bit as approachable and tuneful as its companion. Still’s handling of orchestral colour is masterly, and much of the work has a pastoral, open-air quality. The short third movement, marked With a graceful lilt, is a delight, its syncopations deliciously sprung. Still spent time working in Hollywood, and it shows: much of this would sit comfortably beneath a film score credit.

It is the finale, though, that lingers longest. Here the orchestra plays as though it feels every bar, the intensity mounting steadily as Still builds towards his climax. There is nothing contrived about the growth; it simply gathers weight and conviction until the music seems to fill the hall. It is the clearest demonstration on the disc of how deeply these players have taken this music to heart.

The National Symphony Orchestra is superbly showcased, every section adding vivid detail, and Noseda draws out both the character and the narrative of each score. In the booklet, the conductor writes warmly of how living with these works has enriched his knowledge of the music America produced in the last century, and he hopes they will find the wide following they deserve.

On this evidence, they should. These are not museum pieces dusted off out of duty but symphonies that sound as though they have been part of the repertoire all along, and we had simply mislaid them. Consider them found.