A Concert and a Premiere Broadcast by Bass-Baritone Timothy Jones, Pianist Howard Watkins, and ROCO
Margaret Bonds (1913-72) is commanding increasing attention as a composer lately – an acknowledgment that is at once timely and long overdue. But she was also a pianist, and apparently quite a good one. She received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees as a pianist from Northwestern University, where she studied with acclaimed piano pedagogue Emily Boettcher Bogue (1907-92) and performed as soloist in the oft-discussed premiere of Florence Price’s First Piano Concerto with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago. She then went on to study in New York with Djane Lavoie-Herz (1889-1982; herself a student of Schnabel and Scriabin and a teacher of Ruth Crawford Seeger). She concertized actively as a soloist, duo pianist, and collaborative pianist for her entire career – nearly forty years’ worth of music-making by a musical mind whose brilliance was nothing short of extraordinary.
But precious little of Bonds’s original music for piano solo has been published to date – and no recordings of her own playing. (Learn more)
Until now.
A few years ago, in 2018, an acetate transcription disc was discovered in the Mastersons Collection of Rienzi, one of the Historic House Museums managed by the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. The disc contains a recording of several numbers from a rehearsal for a musical that was never produced. And the pianist in this recording was (you guessed it) Margaret Bonds.
Now that recording has been accessed, and ROCO will broadcast it as part of a Celebration of Margaret Bonds to be streamed on Thursday, Feb. 4 at 7:00 p.m. CST as part of ROCO’s Connections series. Here’s a link to ROCO’s page about the concert, and here’s a story from the Houston Chronicle.
In addition to the premiere broadcast of this recording, Thursday’s program will include four of Bonds’s songs on texts by Langston Hughes, her Troubled Water for piano solo, Robert Owens’s (1925-2017) song Tearless (text also by Hughes), two songs by her friend and mentor Florence B. Price (1887-1953), and the War Scenes by her friend and student Ned Rorem (b. 1923). All will be performed by bass-baritone Timothy Jones, with Howard Watkins at the piano.
It promises to a remarkable evening from start to finish for the ever-growing group of music-loving folk who are coming to know and appreciate the genius of Margaret Bonds. I’ll hope to see you there (virtually).