Florence Price Piano Concerto

[4candles]

Prompted by Eric's post in the 'Unsung Concerts 2022' board, members may like to know that Price's Piano Concerto in One Movement is to be released in April on the Avie label, with Michelle Cann at the piano. The disk also features a second release within six months of this composer's Ethiopia's Shadow in America, as well as works by Valerie Coleman and Jessie Montgomery.

Details.

[Alan Howe]

Utterly predictable stuff - does she simply recycle the same old material from work to work?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fU9NHe2zVk

[terry martyn]

I'm not altogether sure that it's always her own stuff that is being regurgitated here as I thought I heard poor Borodin pummeled at times. Halfway through, I had to call it a day!

[Rainolf]

Price was definitely a lyrical talent, and there are some nice melodies in this concerto, as well as in her symphonies. She also had a gift for effective instrumentation. But the more music I get to know of her's, the more she makes me the impression of being trapped in her own mannerisms. She uses a few types of melody over and over without developing them in a really interesting way - no striking harmonic progressions, no motivic condensation, no intensification of texture via polyphony; but no courageous anti-classical primitivisms in the way of Janacek or Bartok, too. You get either pathetic gestures or lyrical gestures or Juba dances (which are in my opinion the best parts of her pieces), but never the the music rises over a sequence of nice episodes. Often it sounds to my ears as if the composer has no idea how to progress after a few bars. In her multi-movement sonata form pieces the recurring weakness is the all-to short finale, as it is the case with this piano concerto.
Price's contemporary Donald Tovey, who was a really interesting composer, once devided the composers of the past into the Great Artists and the Historical Interesting Figures (HIF). Florence Price is definitely a HIF.

[Alan Howe]

A very insightful critique - thanks!