One of the greatest musical sensations of recent years was the rediscovery of a composer who died more than half a century ago. Florence Price, the first African-American woman to have a work performed by a major orchestra, has posthumously emerged as an important late Romantic composer with a strong personal voice and a compositional technique second to none. Only a few of her works were published during her lifetime, and many did not come to light until 2009, when a stack of scores was found in an abandoned house in Illinois. Since then, we have been witnessing a veritable Price renaissance, with increasingly frequent performances of her music in the United States and abroad.

Price composed a total of four symphonies, of which the whereabouts of No. 2 are presently unknown. No. 3 was first performed by the Detroit Civic Orchestra under conductor Valter Poole in 1940, but was subsequently forgotten until its recent revival.

Trying (unsuccessfully) to interest Serge Koussevitzky in her music, Price provided the longtime music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra with the following description of her Third Symphony:

I have a symphony in which I tried to portray a cross section of Negro life and psychology as it is today, influenced by urban life north of the Mason and Dixon line. It is not “program” music. I merely had in mid the life and music of the Negro of today and for that reason treated my themes in a manner different from what I would have done if I had centered my attention upon the religious themes of antebellum days, or yet the rag-time and jazz which followed, rather a fusion of these, colored by present cultural influences.

At tonight's concert, we shall hear the second movement, “Andante moderato,” from the four-movement symphony. This gorgeous aria for orchestra opens with a lyrical melody played by the oboe—a distant memory of a spiritual, perhaps—that is subsequently taken over by many other instruments. Clothed in the ever-changing colors of the orchestra, the melody gradually grows in intensity, but the ending is as calm as the beginning was.

Notes By Peter Laki