These works by Florence Price are lavished with love and delivered with a visceral sense of drama,
says Jessica Duchen
RECORDING OF THE MONTH
Price Symphony No. 1 in E minor; Ethiopia’s Shadow in America – Andante^; Piano Concerto in One Movement*^
*Jeneba Kanneh-Mason (piano); Chineke! Orchestra/Roderick Cox; ^Leslie Suganandarajah
Decca 485 3996 59:07 mins
Florence Price, although she enjoyed considerable recognition in her lifetime, was largely forgotten after her death in 1953, her legacy not just neglected but literally abandoned. In 2009, the new owners of what had once been her summer house in St Anne, Illinois, discovered a treasure-trove of her manuscripts in the derelict property, where it had awaited rediscovery for more than half a century. As The New Yorker ’s Alex Ross wrote: ‘That run-down house … is a potent symbol of how a country can forget its cultural history.’
Last year, the Philadelphia Orchestra under Yannick Nézet-Séguin recorded Price’s Symphonies Nos 1 and 3, a release lavished with acclaim. Nevertheless, I’m much more engaged by Chineke!’s account of No. 1. In 1932, Price entered the work for the Wanamaker Foundation Awards; it won first prize (and her Piano Sonata won third). The world premiere was given by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under the conductor Frederick Stock in 1933, in a programme called ‘The Negro in Music’; this made Price the first Black American woman ever to have a symphony performed by a major US orchestra.
The four-movement symphony makes ample use of elements drawn from Black American folk music – the slow movement is a lyrical hymn and the third a Juba Dance, a style that seems just a step away from ragtime and originated among enslaved people on the plantations of the Deep South. Under Roderick Cox, the orchestra gives a high-octane account with a wealth of drama and excitement and a palpable sense of mission. Unlike the Philadelphia, whose almost terminally sleek recording irons out the music’s character and risks sounding like the Philadelphia Orchestra first and Price only second, Chineke!’s playing is viscerally alive. While the piece itself is not Price’s last word on symphonic form, this is as exciting a case as could be made for it. Cox is being widely touted as a rising star conductor; here is grist to that mill.
The collection’s opening work is the Piano Concerto in One Movement, which is nevertheless in three movements without a break – Samantha Ege’s excellent programme notes suggest the composer, applying that ti
