The cantata The Ballad of the Brown King (1954) is an important work, James Bennett II from New York Public Radio WQXR posits: “Margaret Bonds’ multi-part choral work, for which she collaborated with poet Langston Hughes, is an attempt to recapture the titular brownness that has art-historically been associated with one of the biggest holidays of one of the world’s biggest religions.
“Like the worlds in which the Nativity story exists, there is no singular style that dominates Bonds’s work; over the course of about 25 minutes, there’s the western orchestra’s pastoral serenity alongside gospel and black-and-bluesy American folk traditions.”
But it was not a straight line to success. From John Michael Cooper here: “Bonds and Hughes then shelved the cantata despite this impact, but as the Freedom movement gained headway in the early 1960s, they returned to it – revising it, adding two movements, and energetically promoting it in advance of the performance.
“The premiere of the reworked version took place, in a now-lost version employing piano-duet accompaniment, to a packed house in a concert produced by the Emergency Committee for the Southern Freedom Struggle on Sunday, 11 December 1960, at the Harlem YWCA at 50th St. and 8th Ave; the work was dedicated to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “
From Wikipedia: “A new orchestration of the piece by conductor Malcolm J. Merriweather was recorded in 2018 by the Dessoff Choirs and released on November 1, 2019. Margaret Bonds’s original orchestration is unpublished and has never been recorded.
Balthazar
“Ballad focuses on one of the Three Kings from the story of the birth of Jesus. Hughes chose the African king, Balthazar, as a way to ‘reinforce the image of African participation in the Nativity story.'”
Here is The Ballad of the Brown King:
The Dessoff Orchestra and The Dessoff Choirs
The Chapel Hill Chorus – ‘Wint’ry Light’ 12/15/24
UUCSR Choir and Soloists with The Orchestra at Shelter Rock, Manhasset, NY, with remarks