Florence PRICE (1887-1953)
Symphony No 1 in E minor (1931-1932) [40:06]
Symphony No 3 in C minor (1938-1940) [31:08]
Philadelphia Orchestra/Yannick Nézet-Séguin
rec. May 2021, Verizon Hall, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
DEUTSCHE GRAMMOPHON 486 2029 [71:14]
“America has always desperately needed her saints,” Leonard Bernstein once said, “partly out of a profound cultural guilt.” He had not yet conceived the resonances that were to accrue upon the word “guilt” in decades to follow, but his remarks aptly forecasted the impetus behind the cult of personality that has rapidly grown around African-American composer Florence Price. Her unlikely canonization is the latest triumph of the visual over the musical that Luigi Dallapiccola had lamented as fait accompli more than sixty years ago, a result abetted by a classical music establishment perennially embarrassed by its own well-monied whiteness (but never enough to relinquish its own class privileges).
Inverting the bigotry of yesteryear, Price’s zealots cast her music to the side, instead condescendingly fixating upon her sex and appearance. Richard Evidon’s liner notes for this new Deutsche Grammophon disc of Price’s First and Third symphonies (previously available via download and streaming only) trade in this same rhetoric of sentimentality, garnished by Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s nugatory bromide that traipses perilously close to Earth Mother stereotypes: “It feels as if [Price] loved all the instruments equally.” She “had a difficult time making headway in a culture that defined composers as white, male, and dead”, according to Evidon; that is a fundamentally dishonest response to Serge Koussevitzky’s silence in the face of Price’s pleas on behalf of her music.
“To begin with I have two handicaps—those of sex and race,” Price wrote to Koussevitzky in 1943. That same year, Koussevitzky (who along with Leopold Stokowski was the most enthusiastic champion of living music among American conductors of his time) led the world and local premieres of works by Igor Stravinsky, Bohuslav Martinů, Lukas Foss, William Schuman, and Roy Harris. He also jammed his programs with works still recent enough to be considered new, composed by Dmitri Shostakovich, Paul Hindemith, Aram Khachaturian, Aaron Copland, and others. Cursory comparison between any of those works and these Price symphonies reveal that Koussevitzky may have acted out of solicitous consideration of a worse, unmentioned, third handicap that hobbled the composer, rather than any desire to subject her to Jim Crow passive-aggression.
With charitable understatement, Evidon describes these symphonies as “traditionally laid-out, stylistically conservative, and [...] manifestly indebted to Dvořák’s ‘New World’ Symphony.” They are, in fact, regressive, even reactionary. Plainly derivative, especially in their respective outer movements, they verge at times on pastiche; they are propelled solely by the limited charisma of Price’s winsome melodies, with blustery padding making up for symphonic architecture. It is bewildering that their “genius” is being proclaimed despite all of that and the fact that they emerged from the same decade that also produced such remarkable scores as Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony, Gavriil Popov’s First Symphony, Edgard Varčse’s Ionisation, Alban Berg’s Lulu, Silvestre Revueltas’s Homenaje a Federico García Lorca, Béla Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, and the first of Anton Webern’s visionary late cantatas. All of those works are teeming with inherent and multifarious originality that widened the boundaries of musical expression.
Price manages to develop a more personal sound in the inner movements of her symphonies, where she is perhaps less encumbered by the weight of her stylistic model. Stately drumming animates the spiritual-inflected brass choir heard in the First’s “Largo, maestoso.” Less distinctive, but still appealing is the corresponding movement of her Third Symphony, where a descending folk-like lullaby works its way through the orchestra, occasionally touched by the glimmer of a celesta, until reaching a grand, but restrained climax. Both of these slow movements are followed by complaisant symphonic scherzi that evoke the juba, an African-American dance popular during the 19th century. There is a palpable whiff in these movements of the quasi-classical instrumental pop of Nathaniel Shilkret and Ferde Grofé, albeit without their Jazz Age moxie. The fleeting slide whistle in the First’s scherzo is mirthless, conveying none of the electric frivolity conjured by the sudden eruption of the police siren in Hindemith’s Kammermusik Nr. 1; the brief xylophone solo in the Third’s scherzo is no match for the chthonic saxophone in Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Sixth Symphony, with its intimation of man-made horrors amidst postwar decadence. Missing, too, is the willingness to pursue the daring implications of African-American musical vernacular heard in Frederick Delius’s Koanga and especially Appalachia; both works predate Price’s comparatively timid symphonies by three decades and surpass them all by their transcendent beauty.
Of a piece with almost all of the rest of their discography under Nézet-Séguin, these performances by the Philadelphia Orchestra are efficient, slick, and edgeless.
Although Price was a modestly talented composer whose work deserves better recognition than it had previously earned, she is hardly “America’s forgotten musical genius.” Her acclamation—to the detriment of the American continent’s genuine forgotten musical geniuses, among them Revueltas, Amadeo Roldán (whose all too slim musical output displays his imaginative use of Afro-Cuban elements), Luis Humberto Salgado, Roger Sessions, and Wallingford Riegger—is a troubling development for those who believe that a work’s musical merit is determined by factors unrelated to its potential use as fodder in the interminable culture wars.
Néstor Castiglione
