[Florence
B. Price: Concerto in One Movement, Symphony in E Minor; New
Black Music Repertory Ensemble; Leslie B. Dunner, Conductor; Karen
Walwyn, Piano; Albany Records 1295 (2011)]
Florence B. Price (1887-1953)
is
profiled at AfriClassical.com, which features a comprehensive Works
List by Prof. Dominique-René de Lerma,
http://www.CasaMusicaledeLerma.com
A review at New Music Box of the recent Albany Records CD of works
of Florence B. Price also mentions numerous other composers of
African descent, many of whom are also featured at AfriClassical.com:
New Music
Box
By Frank J. Oteri on January 17,
2012
“Since yesterday was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I thought
it was an appropriate day to listen almost exclusively to music by
African-American classical music composers—a group of composers who
all too often get excluded from the pantheon of our nation’s most
significant creative artists even at a time when we make extremely
valiant attempts to celebrate diversity. While a handful of
African-American composers alive now have the opportunity to hear
their music performed by orchestras and other large-scale enterprises
around the country and the past giants of jazz, blues, and other
genres are rightfully revered (some even on postage stamps), pioneers
like William Grant Still (1895-1978), R. Nathaniel Dett
(1882-1943), William Levi Dawson (1899-1990), Ulysses Kay
(1917-1995), and many others have yet to enter the standard
repertoire of concert halls.”
“The most recent
attempt to right the wrong of the current neglect of Florence
Price’s
music is the latest installment in an ongoing series of CDs entitled
'Recorded Music of the African Diaspora' featuring the New Black
Music Repertory Ensemble and released by Albany Records under the
auspices of the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College
in Chicago. Like its aforementioned Women’s Philharmonic forebear,
the latest addition to the Florence Price discography is also the
result of some intrepid musical archaeology. The disc opens with
Price’s Concerto in One Movement, a work which premiered in Chicago
in 1934 with the composer as soloist and which was subsequently
performed by another early 20th century African-American female
composer-pianist Margaret
Bonds,
who later became a close friend of and frequent collaborator with
Langston Hughes. Yet the original orchestral score for this
composition is lost; all that has survived are three manuscripts (all
in the composer’s hand): a solo piano version, a three-piano
arrangement, and a two-piano arrangement containing some marginal
notes about instrumentation (although it is not known if these were
written by her before or after the completion of the original
orchestration). The Center for Black Music Research commissioned
composer Trevor Weston to reconstruct an authoritative orchestration
from the surviving materials, and this work received its premiere on
February 17, 2011, with pianist Karen Walwyn and the New Black
Repertory Ensemble conducted by Leslie B. Dunner; the same forces
appear on the present recording. The Concerto, in its current guise,
is an extremely exciting and approachable work.
“The rest of the
disc is devoted to that historic first Symphony in E Minor, a massive
nearly 40-minute work.”
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