Hartford Symphony Orchestra - Dvorák & Price - Florence B. Price (Born April 9, 1888 in Little Rock, Arkansas Died June 3, 1953 in Chicago)

Florence B. Price (Born April 9, 1888 in Little Rock, Arkansas Died June 3, 1953 in Chicago)

Violin Concerto No. 1 in D major (1939)

World Premiere: 2018
Last HSO Performance: HSO Premiere
Instrumentation: flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, French horn, trumpet, timpani, strings
Duration: 23’

Florence B. Price was a musical pioneer — one of the first African-American students to graduate from the New England Conservatory of Music, the first African-American woman to have a symphonic work performed by a major American orchestra, the first winner of the composition contest sponsored by the progressive Wanamaker Foundation.

Florence Beatrice Smith was born in 1888 into the prosperous and cultured family of a dentist in Little Rock, Arkansas, and received her first piano lessons from her mother, a schoolteacher and singer; Florence first played in public when she was four. She later also took up organ and violin, and at age fourteen was admitted to the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where she studied with George Chadwick and Frederick Converse, two of their generation’s leading composers, wrote her first string trio and a symphony (now lost), and graduated in 1907 with honors for both an artist diploma in organ and a teaching certificate. She returned to Arkansas, where she taught at Arkadelphia Academy and Shorter College before being appointed music department chairman at Clark University in Atlanta in 1910. She returned to Little Rock two years later to marry attorney Thomas J. Price, and left classroom teaching to devote herself to raising two daughters, giving private instruction in violin, organ and piano, and composing.

In 1927, following racial unrest in Arkansas that included a lynching, the Price family moved to Chicago, where Florence studied composition, orchestration, organ, languages and liberal arts at various schools with several of the city’s leading musicians and teachers. Black culture and music flourished in Chicago — jazz, blues, spirituals, popular, theater, even classical — educational opportunities were readily available, recording studios were established, the National Association of Negro Musicians was founded there in 1919, and Price took advantage of everything. She ran a successful piano studio, wrote educational pieces for her students, published gospel and folksong arrangements, composed popular songs (under the pseudonym VeeJay), and performed as a church and theater organist. Among her many friends were the physician Dr. Monroe Alpheus Majors and his wife, organist and music teacher Estelle C. Bonds, and Price became both friend and teacher to their gifted daughter, Margaret. In 1932, Price and Bonds (then just nineteen) won respectively first and second prize in the Rodman Wanamaker Foundation Composition Competition, established to recognize classical compositions by Black composers, Price for her Symphony in E minor and Piano Sonata and Bonds for her song Sea Ghost. The performance of Price’s Symphony on June 15, 1933 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Frederick Stock, was the first by a major American orchestra of a symphonic work by an African-American woman. Price continued to compose prolifically — three more symphonies and two more piano concertos, a violin concerto, chamber, piano and organ pieces, songs, spiritual arrangements, jingles for radio commercials — and received numerous performances, including her arrangement of the spiritual My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord that Marian Anderson used to close her historic concert at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. on April 9, 1939. Florence Price died in Chicago on June 3, 1953.

Price composed her Violin Concerto No. 1 in 1939; the provenance of the piece is unknown, as are any early performances. The manuscript ended up among the many scores, letters, diaries and photographs discovered in 2009 in the Chicago house in which she died that are now preserved in the Florence Beatrice Smith Price Collection at the University of Arkansas. The score was published in 2022 in an edition by UofA violin faculty member Er-Gene Kahng, who first made the work available on a 2018 Troy CD in which she was soloist with the Janáček Philharmonic and conductor Ryan Cockerham. The public premiere was given on February 24, 2019 at the War Memorial Auditorium in Trenton, New Jersey by violinist Samuel Thompson, the New Jersey Capital Philharmonic and conductor Daniel Spalding.

The spacious, sonata-form opening movement of Price’s Violin Concerto No. 1 is lyrical rather than dramatic, with much of its energy supplied by the soloist’s virtuoso passagework, including several cadenzas. The first cadenza occurs after an orchestral introduction as a transition to the movement’s main theme, a sunny, easy-going melody presented by the soloist. This congenial tune is elaborated to lead to the blues-inflected second theme, also initiated by the soloist. Another solo cadenza bridges to the development section, which incorporates both themes. As in Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor, a cadenza leads to the recapitulation of the exposition’s materials before the movement closes with a display of dazzling violin virtuosity. The three sections of the Andante (A–B–A) are characterized by Price’s innate lyricism, with a pastoral, almost hymnal, theme in the outer sections and a poignant song in lilting meter at the center. Though it is unknown if Price had a particular soloist in mind when writing this Concerto in 1939 (Jascha Heifetz, then at the height of his fame, appeared that year as himself in his only film role in the Samuel Goldwyn movie They Shall Have Music), the technical demands and moto perpetuo figurations of the finale indicate that it would have been a violinist of the first order.