Sergio Mims: Naxos announces first release of their Florence Price Symphony Series

Florence B. Price (1887-1953)

Sergio A. Mims writes:

This is exciting news on a long awaited project. Naxos has just officially announced the first series of their Florence Price symphonic works with the release of her Symphonies No. 1 and 4 performed by the Fort Smith Symphony conducted by John Jeter coming out on January 11th.

According to the press release:

Florence Price was born in Little Rock, Arkansas and studied at the New England Conservatory, but it was in Chicago that her composing career accelerated. The concert in 1933 at which her Symphony No. 2 in E minor was premiered was the first time a major American orchestra had performed a piece written by an African American woman. Influenced by Dvorak and Coleridge-Taylor, she drew on the wellspring of Negro spirituals and vernacular dances, full of lyricism and syncopation. The Symphony No. 4 in D minor demonstrates her tight ensemble writing, her distinct sense of orchestral color, her Ellingtonian ‘jungle style’ language and her penchant for the ‘juba’ dance.