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Catalyst Quartet’s New Album, “UNCOVERED Volume 3”

Released on Azica Records, the album includes works by composers Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, George Walker, and William Grant Still

 

Founded by the Sphinx Organization in 2010, the GRAMMY Award-winning Catalyst Quartet comprises violinists Karla Donehew Perez and Abi Fayette, violist Paul Laraia and cellist Karlos Rodriguez

Their digital-only album, “UNCOVERED Volume 3: George Walker, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, William Grant Still,” is part of a multi-series anthology aiming to highlight string quartet works by historically significant Black composers and bring them to greater prominence. To purchase and listen to the album, click here.

This album features George Walker’s String Quartet No. 1 “Lyric,” Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s String Quartet No. 1 “Calvary,” and William Grant Still’s Lyric Quartet.

All composed around 1940 to 1956 with three movements each, these works represent Walker and Perkinson in their younger years and Still at the height of his career. 

Each composition is a testament to their place in concert music of the 20th century and their deliberate engagement with what musicologist Eileen Southern called “Black musical materials” in their writing styles. Witness to the Black artistic, political, and social initiatives of their time, the trio also lived through the deep social contradictions that exist to this day in the US and abroad.

The UNCOVERED collection's Vol. 1 featured the works of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Vol. 2 featured Florence Price.

 

 “[Still, Walker, and Perkinson] share exceptionally fruitful and diverse careers that brought them into the most coveted spaces of the concert music art world,” writer and ethnomusicologist M. Myrta Leslie Santana wrote in the album booklet. “The renewed interest in their compositions will, however, belatedly, chip away at the dynamics that often hindered the circulation of their work.”

Produced and recorded by sound engineer Alan Bise of Azica Records, this album was recorded at New York’s American Academy of Arts and Letters.

 

 

The Catalyst Quartet has appeared as soloists with the Cincinnati Symphony, New Haven Symphony, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Orquesta Filarmónica de Bogotá, — and served as principal players with the Sphinx Virtuosi on six national tours. They have played sold-out performances at The Kennedy Center, Miami’s New World Center, and Carnegie Hall, plus on international tours.

The quartet has been Ensemble-in-Residence at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Portland, Oregon’s Chamber Music Northwest. Its members hold degrees from the Cleveland Institute of Music, Curtis Institute of Music, Juilliard School, and New England Conservatory.

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