Information
Composer: Florence Price
- Symphony No. 1 in E minor
- Symphony No. 3 in C minor
Philadelphia Orchestra
Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conductor
Date: 2021
Label: Deutsche Grammophon
https://www.deutschegrammophon.com/en/catalogue/products/price-symphonies-nos-1-3-nezet-seguin-12476
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This has been a fascinating experience. I chose to come to this music – exhumed as it is from nearly a century of neglect – as new music. That’s how I wanted to hear it for the first time. I have only the bare outline of a back story and the now familiar headline that Florence Price was the first black woman to have a symphony – her First in E minor – performed by a major American orchestra. I’ve even chosen not to read what I am sure is an illuminating feature by Andrew Farach-Colton (see page 28), the better to come to these symphonies with absolutely no preconceptions. And (this surprised even me) I was never for a moment able to second-guess them.
Actually even the dates are deceptive because Price’s music – despite obvious models such as Dvořák’s New World Symphony – is clearly in the business of bucking trends and seeing things from her own unique perspective. It is music of great honesty and truth, full of hurt and sorrow but equally a joyous awareness of the spirit driving the black experience in her time.
In the opening paragraph of the First Symphony my mind cast back to the Second Symphony of Charles Ives, where European models such as Dvořák and Brahms underpin the emergent idiosyncrasies of the man and his musical ethos. Price sets out with a Dvořákian pastoral of sorts but one born and bred in the American Deep South. The second subject is infused with a homespun quality that in terms of authenticity makes even Dvořák sound like a tourist. The underlying ache is inescapable. But so too is an original musical voice. Some of the harmony is very much her own, as is her self-evident delight in the melodic development, where something as simple as offering the violas their moment in the sun can sound like a minor revelation. And who – not me – could have predicted the halting trumpet-led twist into the entirely unexpected coda, where the threat, the uncertainty, is so disarming? This is the first but not the last time in either symphony that storm clouds roll in unpredictably.
But it’s the second-movement Largo which immerses us for the first time in a music that resonates for the ages. This post-Mahlerian funeral procession, which might not be out of place on the streets of New Orleans today, is a trumpet and tenor-drum-led oration that speaks of sorrow but more importantly of dignity and resolve. Price loves her brass chorales, as we shall hear. But she also loves her Jubas, with their jazzy strutting cakewalk manner and rhythms celebrating the body-slapping improvisations that so defiantly substituted for confiscated drums. She even throws in a slide-whistle to wilfully coarsen the joyful noise.
It’s abundantly clear from this recording – download-only for now, but it will be issued on CD in January – that Yannick Nézet-Séguin and his Philadelphia Orchestra are body and soul into the joy and resolve of this music. Price can only have dreamt of performances like these – the fire, the spontaneity, the poetry of the many wind solos, the unapologetic tone that focuses not on neglect but discovery.
The weight of history bears down on the opening movement of the Third Symphony – another of Price’s signature brass chorales, ‘lest we forget’, morphing into a second subject on trumpet and trombone that wraps around you like a warm embrace. Again it’s the hope, not the sorrow, that holds sway. These are big moments where Price clearly feels the burden of the African American experience but allows it to fuel her soul.
The simple and the homespun can grow mighty in her music. There is a quiet pride and majesty about it but equally an infectious joy in the unquenchable spirit of her brothers and sisters. Nézet-Séguin is clearly on a mission to convey that. It isn’t music that was ever going to change the world or indeed the American landscape as Ives and others did – but its honesty, emotional truth and exuberance make it so much more than just a footnote. Had the world been different, what then of Florence Price? What might have been? Plenty of clues here.
-- Edward Seckerson, Gramophone
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Florence Price (April 9, 1887 – June 3, 1953) was an American classical composer. She was educated at the New England Conservatory of Music, and was active in Chicago from 1927 until her death. Price is noted as the first African-American woman to be recognized as a symphonic composer, and the first to have a composition played by a major orchestra. She composed over 300 works, including four symphonies, four concertos, as well as choral works, art songs, chamber music and music for solo instruments. Price received praise for the blending of western education and African American culture in her music.
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Yannick Nézet-Séguin (born 6 March 1975) is a Canadian conductor and pianist. He studied piano with Anisia Campos at the Conservatoire de musique du Québec, choral conducting with Joseph Flummerfelt at the Westminster Choir College, and in many master classes with renowned conductors. Nézet-Séguin considers Charles Dutoit as his first inspiration as a child and Carlo Maria Giulini as his master. He is currently music director of the Orchestre Métropolitain (Montréal), the Metropolitan Opera, and the Philadelphia Orchestra. He was the principal conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra from 2008 to 2018.
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