Title: Piano Concerto in D minor in One Movement
Duration: Approximately 18 minutes
Composer: Florence Price (Born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1887; died in Chicago in 1953)
Work composed: 1934
World premiere: The first performance took place at the Chicago Musical College (Chicago, Illinois) in 1934, with Florence Price as the piano soloist
Instrumentation: solo piano, flute, oboe, 2 clarinets, bassoon, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, timpani, percussion (bass drum, snare drum, suspended cymbal, crash cymbals), strings
Born in Arkansas, Florence Price was a gifted pianist as a child. Fostering her daughter’s talents, her mother enrolled her at the New England Conservatory for college musical studies. At New England, Price studied piano, organ, and composition with some of the leading teachers in America—but she had to “pass” as Mexican to avoid the scourges of racial prejudice against African Americans. After graduating from the Conservatory, she had a brief collegiate teaching career, but soon returned to Arkansas, married, and began a family life. In 1927, however, yet another brutal lynching in Little Rock persuaded Price, her husband, and children to move north to Chicago as part of what has been called the “Great Migration” of African Americans fleeing oppression in the South. In Chicago’s South Side, the Chicago Black Renaissance was awakening, with the likes of Louis Armstrong and Mahalia Jackson.
Although already busy as a concert pianist, organist, teacher, and composer, in 1931 Price entered a national composition competition. Price was awarded the top prize in 1932 for her submission of her (first) Symphony in E minor. The work soon was championed and performed by the Chicago Symphony conducted by Frederick Stock, and Price is now known as the first Black American woman to have written a symphony as well as to have one performed by a major American orchestra. The Symphony’s reception was overwhelmingly positive. Riding on the welcome waves of that success, and knowing that Price was an exceptional keyboardist, Chicago’s conductor Stock also encouraged Price to compose a piano concerto. Price’s response was her Piano Concerto in D minor, also known as her Piano Concerto in One Movement, in 1934. It was premiered that same year at the Chicago Musical College with Price herself as the piano soloist. Again, the reviews were very positive.
Despite her moments of fame, Price continually struggled for recognition during her lifetime, as did so many other African American artists. She would continue to be hindered from building her career by two deeply set prejudices in American society. As she wrote in 1943 to Serge Koussevitzky, the famous conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Price described the shameful hurdles that she faced:
“To begin with I have two handicaps—those of sex and race. I am a woman; and I have some Negro blood in my veins. Knowing the worst, then, would you be good enough to hold in check the possible inclination to regard a woman’s composition as long on emotionalism but short on virility and thought content;—until you shall have examined some of my work? … As to the handicap of race, … I should like to be judged on merit alone—the great trouble having been to get conductors, who know nothing of my work … to even consent to examine a score.”
Koussevitzky never answered her request, perhaps proving the very prejudices that she was struggling against.
As with so many of her other works, however, within several years Price’s Piano Concerto was forgotten. After her early death in 1953 due to a stroke, even the score of the Concerto seemed lost to the ages. In 2009, however, many of her manuscripts were found in her abandoned summer home in St. Anne, Illinois, outside of Chicago. This treasure trove was a great help in rediscovering this truly gifted American composer, including, at first, some parts of the Concerto. Finally, in 2019, a complete manuscript was found in the St. Anne house, and this Concerto (with thanks to editors Nick Greer and Clovis Lake) can now be heard as Price first premiered it. And this is, indeed, a very fortuitous discovery, for Price’s Concerto is truly exceptional. A lone trumpet begins the first movement, Andantino (not too fast), with a short unhurried little motive that has an easy-going African American Spiritual character to it. The motive is then answered by the upper winds. The trumpet, winds, and the horn, then trade the motive between them in a call-and-response sequence. As nearly all of Price’s works do, she’s celebrating the rich heritage of African American music and yet uncannily enveloping it into a classical sound. This Spiritual-esque motive will drive this first movement through many a musical moment, but next comes the unexpected—a lengthy solo piano cadenza, alive with drama and gorgeous chord progressions. When the orchestra returns, the air becomes filled again with that opening Spiritual motive, but now, the tempo feels a little quicker, and the motive has acquired an urgency. The Concerto begins taking on a sense of narrative and Price creates some exceptional musical adventures. An especially spine-tingling moment occurs at about three minutes—the piano solo begins a series of step-wise descending octaves, and as its intensity grows, the orchestra begins to sneak in behind it in unison, with instrumental colors that make this passage sound increasingly diabolical, but ending in a most majestic climax. In much the same way as Liszt used a brief motive in his tone poems (and piano concertos) and transformed them throughout the entire work, so does Price here in this Concerto. Price’s transformations, too, are enchanting and varied, from the diabolical to grand, lyrical to mighty—in just seven short minutes in this movement, Price circumnavigates a universe of magical musical moments, filled with, as piano soloist Michelle Cann said, “beauty and power.”
Though the work is titled Piano Concerto… in One Movement, there are, in fact, three distinct movements, but the separations between them are extremely brief. Hardly a breath separates the end of the first movement from the second, Adagio cantabile (slowly, in a singing style). This is one of Price’s richest and most gorgeous pieces of music. The strings deliver a brief introduction of lush and floating chords, and then the piano and oboe enter into a long and dreamy duet. The whole movement is a rhapsodic hymn. Some of the pianist’s musical tapestry is densely packed like jazz chords, and at times, the momentum of the rhapsodizing builds into an exquisite climax in the manner that makes Spirituals so poignant. The movement indeed sings, and again, in just its few minutes of length, the depth of its emotional character is vast and intoxicating.
With little pause, the third movement begins, slowly at first with a brief up-and-down oscillation figure played by the winds. Shortly, the tempo picks up, Allegretto (light, graceful, and moderately fast) and Price takes that short introductory figure and speeds it up into a ragtime feel. Thus begins a Juba dance. The Juba was well known to African Americans—before Emancipation, antebellum slave owners feared that enslaved peoples would use drums to transmit secret, subversive codes, and therefore drums were banned. Instead, African Americans created a dance, which came to be known as the Juba, that used body slapping and stomping to supply the rhythms for the dancers—but Price uses some orchestral percussion instead. Price particularly loved this dance form, and used it as the third movement in each of her symphonies. Each is filled with character and exuberance, but the addition of the piano to the dance in this Concerto may be her most cheerful Juba of them all. Syncopation (music that stresses the weak beats of the measure, typically with complicated rhythms) fills the movement, giving the music a jaunty, spring-in-your-step kind of delight. As for syncopation, at about one minute into the dance, Price creates a lengthy, splendid series of jangled off-beats in the piano, almost to the point of being disorienting, only to save it after a few bars—this episode happens twice, and each time, when the music gets back on track, the feeling of jubilance is extremely satisfying. The pianist plays with their fingers dancing all over the keyboard in a virtuosic showcase. And when this delightful dance comes to its final section, the soloist and orchestra conclude in a riot of joy.