Black classical music played by a Black soloist add up to a powerful evening in St. Paul

Ever since George Floyd's death, orchestras throughout America have committed to performing more music by Black composers. While admirable, audiences can scan the stage and observe a paucity of Black musicians playing that music.

There are many reasons that's true, but I'm glad that clarinetist Anthony McGill is out there doing the work. The first Black section leader in the New York Philharmonic's 180-year history, McGill is also among his instrument's rare recitalists who headline major concert series.

Like the St. Paul-based Schubert Club's International Artist Series. McGill performed the final program of its 2021-22 season on Thursday night, and it proved an emotionally powerful evening — music by contemporary Black composers, interpreted by one of America's most prominent Black soloists.

In tandem with pianist Anna Polonsky, McGill lent the emotionally evocative voice of his clarinet to 21st century works by James Lee III and Jessie Montgomery that expressed unanswerable questions about what it means to be Black in America today.

But he also tapped into the celebratory spirit of another Black composer, Adolphus Hailstork, and took the audience at St. Paul's Ordway Concert Hall to a place of rare beauty with a rhapsody by Claude Debussy, the only non-American composer on the program. Add clarinet sonatas by Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland and you have one of the most enriching recitals the Twin Cities has hosted since live concerts became a thing again.

A high bar was set early with Lee's "Ad Anah?" Inspired by a Hebrew phrase of lamentation for injustice, it was a contemplative opening, filled with McGill's questing phrases climbing upward against Polonsky's grounding dark dissonances. The clarinetist's long held note at the conclusion offered no resolution to the chord or the question.

McGill took the stage alone for Hailstork's "Three Smiles for Tracey," an ebullient work in which the soloist seemed to be playing a game of musical tag with himself, often sounding like two characters engaged in dialogue.

For pure beauty, nothing topped the Debussy rhapsody, a transfixing dreamscape with periodic detours onto troubled terrain. And Montgomery's "Peace" — which McGill dedicated to the people of the Twin Cities in recognition of their difficult 2020 — had an unsettled, questioning tone similar to the Lee work that opened the concert.

After all this, the violin sonata that Aaron Copland rewrote for clarinet in 1980 might seem a conventional conclusion to the concert, but Polonsky's evocations of those grand sonic vistas that Copland can evoke proved a welcome destination. It was easy to tell this was written around the same time as "Appalachian Spring"; they share a similar spirit.

McGill and Polonsky have been playing together since childhood, and never was the bond between clarinetist and pianist more palpable than here. As his final notes faded to a whisper, my admiration deepened for this expert interpreter of music that too seldom graces our concert halls.