Innovative music programming drives today’s major symphony orchestras. Aligning old and new, classic and contemporary, European and American music in concert, even recordings, seems to be a trend.
Durango may be far away from New York, Philly and Baltimore, but the San Juan Symphony and its imaginative music director, Thomas Heuser, are nothing if not innovative when it comes to fresh, tantalizing programs.
The upcoming pair of concerts in Farmington and Durango focus on three works: “Petite Suite,” by a little-known French composer Albert Roussel, “Concerto for Violin and Orchestra” by America’s own Samuel Barber, with soloist Karen Kim, and a Suite of Dances from 1933 by American composer Florence Price.
Florence Who?
Price (1885-1953) was the first African-American woman composer to win the prestigious Rodman Wanamaker Contest in Musical Composition in 1931-32. The next year, her Symphony No. 1 in E minor garnered another honor: Price was the first African-American woman to have a work performed by a major American orchestra. So taken by Price’s symphony, Frederick Stock, conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, programmed the world premiere in 1933. Stock urged Price, age 48, to continue composing big works. She did: four symphonies in all, concerti for violin and piano, and numerous other works. Her “Third Symphony” was commissioned by the Federal Music Project during the Great Depression and performed in 1940.
Born in Arkansas into a mixed-race family, her father a dentist and mother a teacher, Price showed early interest in and talent for the piano. You can read a detailed biography about a young American prodigy on the website www.florenceprice.org.
As a teenager, she enrolled in the New England Conservatory of Music and graduated in 1907. She married Thomas Price, an attorney, in 1912, and they and moved back to Little Rock, where Price composed and taught music. Racial unrest prompted the couple to move to Chicago in 1927. After the Wannamaker Prize in 1932, things blossomed for a time. Price’s compositions blended the musical languages of European classical style with American folk tunes, spirituals and African dance rhythms. Described as a neo-Romantic, Price’s music was compared to both Dvorak and Copland, or, as one critic put it: “Rachmaninoff with an American twist.”
If you go
WHAT: San Juan Symphony, Perpetual Motion, Conductor and Music Director Thomas Heuser, works by Barber, Price and Roussel.
WHEN/WHERE: 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Henderson Performance Hall, Farmington; 3 p.m. Sunday, Community Concert Hall, at Fort Lewis College.
TICKETS: Single ticket prices vary. $15 for a virtual ticket. Available online at sanjuansymphony.org.
MORE INFORMATION: Visit sanjuansymphony.org or call 382-9753.
By the time of World War II, Price’s music had disappeared from concert programs. She died in 1953 of a stroke. In 2009, a collection of her manuscripts was discovered. A decade later, Alex Ross of The New Yorker published an article about the recovered manuscripts. Now, powerful musical forces are driving a Florence Price revival.
Throughout February, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra is celebrating her music in various concerts.
Last week, the Philadelphia Orchestra in its Carnegie Hall series performed Price’s “Symphony No. 1,” ironically paired with a different work by Samuel Barber: “Knoxville: Summer of 1915,” a song for soprano and orchestra.
Philadelphia Music Director and Conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin is on a tear to champion the late American composer. He’s already completed the first full recording of two of her symphonies on the Deutsche Grammophon label and plans more.
Referring to Price’s “Third Symphony,” Nézet-Séguin said in an interview for Broadway World: “I hope it (the ‘Third Symphony’) will become as familiar and as much part of the canon as any other symphony by Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff.”
This weekend, Heuser and the San Juan Symphony will introduce local audiences to Price’s music with a “Suite of Dances” from 1933. The program will conclude with violinist Karen Kim performing Barber’s “Concerto for Violin and Orchestra.”
On Wednesday, Nézet-Séguin will lead the Philadelphia Orchestra in a digital program simply titled: “Mozart and Price.” Conducting from the piano, Nézet-Séguin, will perform Mozart’s “Piano Concerto No. 12,” and after intermission he will lead the orchestra in Price’s “Fourth Symphony,” which she never heard performed in her lifetime.
Discovering Price
Credit San Juan Symphony Concertmaster Lauren Avery for discovering the music of Florence Price and bringing it to the attention of music lovers in the Four Corners.
Kathy Myrick, executive director of SJS, said it was Avery who brought Price’s music to the attention of her husband, Thomas Heuser, and the musicians of the orchestra when the COVID-19 pandemic first began.
“In the spring of 2020, Lauren, like many of the musicians, started researching for other gigs in case we had to shut down,” Myrick said. “She came across Florence Price. As a result, she and violinist Brandon Christensen, colleagues in the orchestra, brought some of Price’s music to small, private performances during that early pandemic time. It was wonderful.”
The Philadelphia Orchestra concert will be streamed. So will the San Juan Symphony concert, which will be available for two weeks after the live event. Be there.
Judith Reynolds is an arts journalist and member of the American Theatre Critics Association.
