SFChronicle.com: Florence Price’s music reveals an undiscovered African-American voice

The San Francisco Chronicle

Joshua Kosman

January 16, 2019

The recent surge of interest in the music of Florence Price (Michael Morgan leads the Oakland Symphony in her Symphony No. 3 on Friday, Jan. 25) is a heartening and important development on several fronts. Most obviously, it rescues from invisibility a key pioneer in the history of African-American music — Price, who died in 1953, wrote symphonies, concertos, vocal works and chamber music, in the face of a host of societal obstacles.

The Fort Smith Symphony, in Price’s native Arkansas, has launched a series of recordings devoted to her music, and the two symphonies here show a canny and often resourceful fusion of European form with American melodic strains.