Deutsche Grammophon (DG) is digitally publishing the Symphony no 4 by Florence Price coupled with the Negro Folk Symphony by William Levi Dawson under the direction of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, recordings made with the Philadelphia Orchestra. This music will have various resonances in Montreal this season.
On the show 60 Minutes, from CBS, Yannick Nézet-Séguin recently declared: “I would like that at the end of my stay on Earth, no one would ever say again: “Oh, classical music is not for me. It’s for cultured people; it’s for the rich; It’s for white people.” » Certainly, the Quebec chef has become, since the murder of George Floyd, the greatest defender of African-American music.
He began his crusade by promoting the symphonic work of composer Florence Price (1887-1953), but we must not forget his commitment to the Metropolitan Opera, for example with the operas of Terence Blanchard Fire Shut Up in my Bones And Champion and, in the coming weeks, the programming of X, The Life and Times of Malcolmby Anthony Davis, which can be seen in theaters on November 18.
Return of the pendulum
The interest of this coupling is to see the 4e and last symphony by Florence Price coupled with the Negro Folk Symphony by William Levi Dawson (1899-1990), a work of particular importance, as we report to you in our article “Classical music and well-tempered opportunism” on December 31. According to cultural historian Joseph Horowitz, the Negro Folk Symphony by Dawson is “the” forgotten masterpiece of American music. Horowitz develops this analysis in an essay entitled The Soul of Black Classical Music, under the prism of what he considers to be the “failure of Dvořák’s prophecy”. “I am now convinced that the future music of this country must be based on the so-called “negro melodies”,” Dvořák wrote at the end of the 19th century.e century. “This must be the true foundation of any serious and original school of composition that will develop in the United States. »
As we summarized in December: “The failure of this path in favor of an American musical identity stemming from European roots (Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Leonard Bernstein) is, according to Horowitz, the fatal error which separated American culture of its true authenticity. For Horowitz, the star system which, in the United States, highlighted orchestras, conductors and soloists rather than composers, and measured these stars against European standards and repertoire, got the better of development of an American musical idiom. »
This publication is therefore, on a historical level, an important swing of the pendulum. We saw it with all the prices gleaned from the CD of Symphonies nbone 1 And 3 of Florence Price by Yannick Nézet-Séguin: there may well have been recordings of the deep and dense Symphony from Dawson before, this is the one we will consider and listen to because it is from DG, by a well-known conductor with a top-notch orchestra.
There 4e Symphony by Florence Price (1945, reputedly lost, found in 2009 then reconstituted and created in 2018) follows the patterns now known: an atmosphere of Negro Spirituals in the 1er shutter, a slow movement (magnificent) which follows that of the “New World” by Dvořák, followed by a Juba Dance which is the signature of Price’s symphonies and a festive finale. The richness of the Philadelphia Orchestra is incomparably greater than that of the Fort Smith Orchestra, which, under the direction of John Jeter, revealed the work to us at Naxos.
For the moment, the DG release does not exist on physical disk and this program is therefore only accessible by downloading or listening online. Big downside: such a publication comes without any accompanying instructions, which, for such a program, is a shame.
There 4e Symphony by Price will be performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra in Montreal on April 19, while the Negro Folk Symphony will be conducted on October 12 at the Montreal Symphony Orchestra by Berlin-based African-American conductor Roderick Cox, who we are happy to see again in Quebec, because he had conducted a very notable 2e Symphony of Rachmaninov in Lanaudière in 2018 with the Métropolitain.