Classical-Scene.com: Castle of Our Skins at Gardner

Florence B. Price (1887-1953)

The Boston Musical Intelligencer

October 27, 2019

By David Patterson

In yet another lane change for the Gardner Museum Sunday afternoon series, Boston-based Castle of Our Skins provisioned a string quartet, two dancers and ten cellos to carry out “Secret Desire to Black. Putting forth four black American composers, the concert proved refreshing and rewarding, albeit a little longwinded.

The opening to both halves of “Secret Desire” showed programming smartness, first with Fuging Tune: Resolute, and second with Calvary Ostinato by Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson (1932-2004). Both are from his 1973 Lamentations: Black Folk Song Suite for solo cello. They are, in the composer’s words, “the reflection and statement of a peoples crying out.” Guest artist, cellist Seth Parker Woods, roared and growled out low string blues subjects to attractive earthy effect despite some loss of musical clarity. Then, he came back for a pizzicato piece with a four-note pattern repeating over and again with newer and newer material plucked in. That was the most fun to hear. Woods lightened the room with his own fine-finish applied across the bowless popping surfaces. Little secret how these short works were penned given a certain amount of indigenous splurge and always recognized by Woods in somewhat purer temperament.

Unearthed not long ago, String Quartet in A Minor of Florence Price (1887-1953) finally achieved its Boston premiere. For years, the music had been lying in the recesses of an Arkansas library. Recall that the Price’s G Major Quartet, composed in 1929, saw its revival but only a few years ago. What of the four-movement opus she wrote in the fall of 1935, taking but five weeks to compete? Overly long, its 32 minutes lit up and dimmed, with the best coming in the outer sections of the Andante Cantabile and just about all throughout Juba, the dancing third movement. As in other Price works, the folkish, what is first nature, or American, alternates with the academic, what is learned, or European. The harmonic language often tells the difference, primal pentatonic leanings versus late 19^th-century chromatic tendencies. Violinists Gabriela Diaz and Mina Lavcheva joined with violist Ashleigh Gordon, and Seth Parker Woods casting the work as mix with pastoral and conservatory flares, ragtime and sonata form. Juba danced truly speaking Price’s eloquent native tongue so steeped in old-time Southern expression.