Bonds: Credo; Simon Bore the Cross

Bonds
Credo; Simon Bore the Cross
Janinah Burnett (soprano), Dashon Burton (bass-baritone); The Dessoff Choirs/Malcolm J Merriweather
Avie AV 2589   62:58 mins

Born in 1913, the Black American composer Margaret Bonds studied with Florence Price and went on to forge a powerful compositional voice that blended African-American idioms with Western classical forms. Beautifully performed here, these two late choral works encapsulate both the warmth of Bonds’s musical language and her passionate advocacy for racial justice.

Credo draws on a fiercely political text by the poet and civil rights activist WEB Du Bois. Each of the work’s seven movements opens with a statement of belief, set to Bonds’s richly-orchestrated score, which ranges from the menacing timpani and bassoons of ‘I Believe in the Devil’ to the lush and lyrical ‘I Believe in the Prince of Peace’. The Dessoff Choirs give a nuanced and committed performance throughout and solo soprano Janinah Burnett brings terrific vibrancy to the hymn-like melody of her solo movement.

Completed in 1965, Simon Bore the Cross sets a stirring text by Bonds’s long-standing collaborator, Langston Hughes, which tells the story of Simon of Cyrene, the North-African man who carried Jesus’s cross on the way to Calvary. Among many highlights, Bonds’s stately setting of the African-American spiritual ‘Crucifixion’ chimes with special force, as does bass-baritone Dashon Burton’s gravely powerful voicing of Pontius Pilate in ‘I Find no Fault’.

Writing to Du Bois’s widow, Bonds once declared she ‘looked forward to a time when Credo will move all over the world’, but sadly Bonds did not hear a complete performance of either work in her lifetime. This landmark recording offers worthy fulfilment of that hope.

Kate Wakeling