MUSIC REVIEWS : Morgan Leads Black Composers’ Works

The Afro-American Chamber Music Society opened its seventh season Sunday with “An Afternoon of Black Classical Music” guest conducted by Michael Morgan, music director of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago.

He led the Society’s scrappy 30-member orchestra in a fascinating program of obscurities: Someone had done some digging. There were three courtly and tuneful minuets by one Ignatius Sancho (1729-1780), an African slave and the first composer of African descent to publish music; the brief “Abertura em Re,” a well-crafted, Italianate introduction and allegro by the Brazilian, Jose Mauricio Nunes Garcia (1767-1830), and the Lisztian rhapsody and demonics of the “Andante et Fantaisie Tzigane”--ably dispatched by pianist Janise White--by Lucien Lambert (1858-1945), a Paris-born opera composer and student of Massenet.

The musical place of honor, however, had to go to the Violin Concerto No. 1 of Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, a lyrical and spirited Classical gem, worth exhuming anywhere. Juilliard student Ashley D. Horne brought an accomplished technique and genuine vitality to the solo duties.

Contemporary works by Ed Bland (his “Grand Slam”) and Frederick Tillis (his Spiritual Fantasy No. 6) completed the program at Schoenberg Hall, UCLA. Morgan kept his motions undemonstrative on the podium and in the process got the orchestra, a multiracial ensemble, to play, if not with the utmost polish, together, without skittishness and with joy.