Donald Macleod explores the life and music of George Walker, in conversation with his son Gregory. Today, Walker looks set for a glittering career as a concert pianist.

When Rosa King Walker announced to her five-year-old son George that, like it or not, he was going to have piano lessons, she can scarcely have been aware that she was dispatching him on a lifelong journey in music. Like many middle-class African-American parents of her generation, she had probably just wanted to make sure that her son was au fait with an important aspect of the ‘dominant’ culture. But things quickly escalated beyond his mother’s original intentions. The boy took to the piano like a duck to water, and by his mid-teens he was off to pursue undergraduate music studies at Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio. After that came a period of post-graduate study at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute under the tutelage, among others, of the legendary Rudolf Serkin. Walker’s concerto début came at the age of 23, when he performed one of the most challenging works in the repertoire, Rachmaninov’s 3rd Piano Concerto, with the Philadelphia Orchestra, no less, under the great Eugene Ormandy. A stellar career on the concert platform surely beckoned, but in the event, things were not so straightforward. It took five years for Walker to find himself an agent, and when he finally did, he was told that it would be difficult getting bookings for a black classical pianist – a prediction which turned out, in the America of the 1950s, to be accurate. Walker had better luck in Europe, where he toured in 1953, but stress got the better of him and he developed a debilitating stomach ulcer. So gradually he began to turn his back on the idea of a solo career, gravitating instead towards a life in teaching – and, increasingly, composition.

Response (Laurence Dunbar)

Phyllis Bryn-Julson, soprano

George Walker, piano

String Quartet No 1 (1st mvt)

Son Sonora String Quartet

Lyric for Strings

London Symphony Orchestra

Paul Freeman, conductor

Piano Sonata No 1 (2nd and 3rd mvts)

George Walker, piano

Cello Sonata (2nd mvt)

Emmanuel Feldman, cello

Joy Cline-Phinney, piano

Trombone Concerto

Christian Lindberg, trombone

Malmö Symphony Orchestra

James DePriest, conductor

Produced by Chris Barstow for BBC Wales