Fantasie Negre: The Piano Music Of Florence Price

Product Description

Florence Price is noted as the first African-American woman to be recognized as a symphonic composer!

Musicologist and pianist, Samantha Ege, celebrates the work of trailblazing composer Florence Price on her highly romantic and expressive new album ”Fantasie Nègre: The Piano Music Of Florence Price.” The physical release coincides with the digital launch on International Women’s Day (8 March 2021). The album includes the first full recording of all four Fantasie Nègre showpieces, following the rediscovery of Price’s Fantasie Nègre No.3. Ege, a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford whose work seeks to highlight composers from underrepresented backgrounds, said: ”As a young pianist, discovering Price made me feel visible. She belonged to a long legacy of black composers who channeled their African heritage into classical forms. The classical mainstream must now work to realize the future that she no doubt hoped to see, one where the concert hall welcomes black classical artists, not only posthumously.”

Florence Price (1887-1953), is best known for her Symphony No.1 in E minor, performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1933. She was the first African-American woman to have her music presented by a major US orchestra. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas and taught by her mother, Price graduated from the New England Conservatory aged 19. While there, she presented herself as Mexican as her black racial identity could preclude her success. Race riots and routine lynchings forced Price’s family to move to Chicago’s South Side after her studies, where she found a vibrant community of African-American musicians and composers. Much of Price’s work, characterized by their blend of European Romantic idioms and those drawn from African American traditional music, came perilously close to being lost following her death – a collection of her manuscripts were rediscovered in a dilapidated house in St. Anne, Illinois, in 2009. Sadly, Price faced continued barriers due to her race and gender, working as a composer and teacher until her death in Chicago in 1953.

TRACK LIST:

Fantasie Nègre No.1 in E minor
Fantasie Nègre No.2 in G minor
Untitled Sketch No.1
Untitled Sketch No.2
Untitled Sketch No.3
Fantasie Nègre No.3 in F minor
Snapshots Lake Mirror
Snapshots Moon Behind a Cloud
Snapshots Flame
Fantasie Nègre No.4 in B minor

Review

The Florence Price revival continues apace. In just the last few weeks, the Philadelphia Orchestra announced that it would record Price’s symphonies under Yannick Nézet-Séguin; the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective released a gorgeous premiere recording of her Piano Quintet in A minor on Chandos; and the musicologists Douglas W. Shadle and Samantha Ege gave notice that they are writing a biography of this long-overlooked composer.

Much of this fresh prominence is because of the labors of a community of scholar-performers like Ege, nine-tenths of whose new album is based on manuscripts rescued from Price’s former summer home in 2009. There are intriguing miniatures here, including a suite of ”Snapshots” written just before Price’s death, in 1953, but the focus is on four pieces named ”Fantasie Nègre,” dating from 1929-33.

Loose sets of variations on spirituals and similar melodies set in Price’s late-Romantic language — one perfumed with pentatonic scales and enriched with a teeming sense of form — these are huge works. Especially the fourth, which Price at one point marked ”Out of the Crucible” — a nod, Ege writes, to ”her own triumphs over adversity.” Triumphs indeed, and if one can now imagine some of this music being performed with a dash more flair, that’s a testament to how Ege has brought this music to the life it more than deserves. Source: DAVID ALLEN for The New York Times