John Jeter forwards this review:
Gramophone
PRICE Symphonies Nos 1 & 4
Patrick Rucker
In addition to the harvest of death, disenfranchisement, pain and
suffering inflicted by societies locked into institutionalised racism,
there is also the incalculable loss of unrealised potential. Combine
pervasive racism with centuries of undervaluing the contributions of
women and the odds against success become all but overwhelming. This new
Naxos release of the First and Fourth Symphonies by Florence Beatrice
Price (1887-1953) is part of the rediscovery now under way of an African
American woman who defied those odds.
A native of Little Rock, Arkansas, Price’s musical education began
early with her piano teacher mother. At 14 she was admitted to New
England Conservatory, where she studied with George Whitefield Chadwick.
In 1910 she was named head of the music department at Clark Atlanta
University. Even after she and her husband moved to Chicago with their
two daughters in the late 1920s, Price continued to study, notably with
Leo Sowerby and Roy Harris.
Price’s First Symphony was composed in 1932 for a contest
sponsored by the Wanamaker Foundation and performed by the Chicago
Symphony under Frederick Stock the following year. Her Fourth Symphony,
composed in 1945 and recorded here for the first time, was discovered in
2009 among a sheaf of manuscripts in her former summer home on the
outskirts of Chicago.
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