The music of African American composer Florence B. Price is gaining renewed attention in 2021. The Symphony No. 3 in C minor heard here has been recorded by no less than Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra. However, in many respects, its biggest champion has been conductor John Jeter, who has programmed and recorded Price's work with his Fort Smith Symphony Orchestra in Arkansas. Here, he gets to reprise the Symphony No. 3 with a stronger group, the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. This work has ...
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The music of African American composer Florence B. Price is gaining renewed attention in 2021. The Symphony No. 3 in C minor heard here has been recorded by no less than Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra. However, in many respects, its biggest champion has been conductor John Jeter, who has programmed and recorded Price's work with his Fort Smith Symphony Orchestra in Arkansas. Here, he gets to reprise the Symphony No. 3 with a stronger group, the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. This work has attracted notice for its syncopated third movement, marked "Juba," but to these ears, that movement sounds like a Black composer imitating white impressions of Black music, and the Austrian musicians seem a bit awkward with it. In the finale, which grafts the quite African American form of march music onto sonata form, the results are much stronger as the orchestra's brass acquit themselves well. Even better are the other two orchestral works; one, The Mississippi River (1934), is quite...
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