Ulysses Kay Essentials

Traditionalism, romanticism and strands of austere modernism often overlap in the music of the American composer Ulysses Kay. Listen to the second of his Six Dances for String Orchestra (1954), a Waltz marked by a steely intensity and generous American spirit, or to Aulos (1967), to hear how he binds these diverse elements together to form a strikingly coherent language, at once personal and universal in its expressive force and inventive span. There’s no want of expressive force in the Overture to Theater Set (1968), one of Kay’s best-known orchestral works, or the Toccata that opens his early Concerto for Orchestra. Yet there’s room, too, for great tenderness, as reflected in the introduction to the magnificent Fantasy Variations (1963) and the haunting Pietà (1950) for cor anglais and strings.