Price Symphony No. 1 in E minor; Ethiopia’s Shadow in America – Andante^; Piano Concerto in One Movement*^ *Jeneba Kanneh-Mason (piano); Chineke! Orchestra/Roderick Cox; ^Leslie Suganandarajah Decca 485 3996 59:07 mins
Florence Price, although she enjoyed considerable recognition in her lifetime, was largely forgotten after her death in 1953, her legacy not just neglected, but literally abandoned. In 2009 the new owners of what had once been her summer house in St Anne, Illinois, discovered a treasure-trove of her manuscripts in the derelict property, where it had awaited rediscovery for more than half a century. As The New Yorker’s music critic Alex Ross wrote: ‘That run-down house … is a potent symbol of how a country can forget its cultural history.’
Last year the Philadelphia Orchestra under Yannick Nézet-Séguin recorded Price’s Symphonies Nos. 1 and 3, a release lavished with acclaim. Nevertheless, I’m much more engaged by Chineke!’s account of No. 1. In 1932 Price entered the work for the Wanamaker Foundation Awards; it won first prize (and her Piano Sonata won third). The world premiere was given by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under the conductor Frederick Stock in 1933, in a programme called ‘The Negro in Music’; this made Price the first Black American woman ever to have a symphony performed by a major US orchestra.
The fourmovement symphony makes ample use of elements drawn from Black American folk music; the slow movement is a lyrical hymn and the third a Juba Dance, a style that seems just a step away from ragtime and originated among enslaved people on the plantations of the Deep South. Under Roderick Cox, the orchestra gives a high-octane account with a wealth of drama and excitement and a palpable sense of mission. Unlike the Philadelphia, whose almost terminally sleek recording irons out the music’s character and risks sounding like the Philadelphia Orchestra first and Price only second, Chineke!’s playing is viscerally alive. While the piece itself is not Price’s last word on symphonic form, this is as exciting a case as could be made for it. Cox is being widely touted as a rising star conductor; here is grist to that mill.
The collection’s opening work is the Piano Concerto in One Movement, which is nevertheless in three movements without a break; Samantha Ege’s excellent programme notes suggest the composer, applying that title, was playing a joke on her audience. Written in 1934, it was only published in 2019; in 2020 Chineke! and Jeneba Kanneh-Mason gave probably its first performance since the composer herself was soloist in the world premiere. It’s a strong, memorable work and tremendous fun, with a virtuoso Rachmaninovesque cadenza in the first movement.
Kanneh-Mason, younger sister of Isata and Sheku, has been making the work very much her own. She first learned it as a student during Covid lockdown and performs it straight from the heart, with care, sparkle and self-possession, sympathetically partnered by the orchestra under Leslie Suganandarajah. Finally comes the tone poem, Ethiopia’s Shadow in America – a work that was highly commended in the same competition that the Symphony won – shows Price at her most serious and poetic. Chineke! simply lavishes it with love.
The recorded sound throughout is lively enough to enhance these high-spirited, passionate performances.
Jessica Duchen
