Florence Price: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 3 The Philadelphia Orchestra & Yannick Nézet-Séguin

• Florence Price (1887 - 1953): Symphony No. 1 in E Minor:
• 1 Price: Symphony No. 1 in E Minor: I. Allegro ma non troppo 18:11
• 2 Price: Symphony No. 1 in E Minor: II. Largo, maestoso 13:22
• 3 Price: Symphony No. 1 in E Minor: III. Juba Dance 03:41
• 4 Price: Symphony No. 1 in E Minor: IV. Finale 04:52
• Symphony No. 3 in C Minor:
• 5 Price: Symphony No. 3 in C Minor: I. Andante 11:27
• 6 Price: Symphony No. 3 in C Minor: II. Andante ma non troppo 09:32
• 7 Price: Symphony No. 3 in C Minor: III. Juba. Allegro 05:05
• 8 Price: Symphony No. 3 in C Minor: IV. Scherzo. Finale 05:04
• Total Runtime 01:11:14

Info for Florence Price: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 3

Florence Price came to prominence almost ninety years ago, having surmounted systemic barriers to the progress of African-Americans and women in classical music. Much of her music then fell into neglect, however, and has only recently been rediscovered. Among those championing her work today are The Philadelphia Orchestra and its Music Director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Their latest Deutsche Grammophon recording, Florence Price · Symphonies Nos. 1 & 3, will be released as an e-album on 24 September 2021, launching a planned series of recordings celebrating the achievements of the first African-American woman to have a work performed by a major American orchestra.

“We’re delighted to record the music of Florence Price for Deutsche Grammophon,” comments Nézet-Séguin. “So much important music around the world has been neglected, not because of the quality of the work, but for superficial reasons. It’s so important to me and to The Philadelphia Orchestra to look at these works, bring back the music of composers we believe in, like Florence Price, and continue broadening the repertoire to give a much more diverse representation of who we are as a society today.”

Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1885, Florence Price received instruction in music from her mother and went on to study composition at the New England Conservatory in Boston and privately with its director George Whitefield Chadwick. After her marriage, she and her family moved to Chicago to escape the racial conflicts of the south. She then divorced her abusive husband and focused on bringing up her children, supporting the family by working as a pianist, organist, teacher and composer.

Her Symphony No. 1 in E minor (1931–32), winner of the Rodman Wanamaker Contest in Musical Composition, was first performed in 1933 by Frederick Stock and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Stock’s support encouraged Price to create other large-scale works. Her Third Symphony, originally commissioned by the Federal Music Project during the Great Depression, was first performed in 1940.

Notes Nezet-Seguin, “In her First Symphony, we hear folkloric melodies blended with church music chords, and chords that are opening up to jazz, to create something that sounds quintessentially American. She was adapting a European form and putting it into her own language … In the Third Symphony, every melody feels as if it should be sung … The material is so vocal, the writing is almost choral. And I love the fact that the orchestration encourages solos from everywhere in the orchestra … It feels as if she loved all the instruments equally.”

Although Price continued to compose and teach until her death in 1953, her music was routinely dismissed as conservative by ultra-modernists. Meanwhile, doors that might otherwise have opened remained firmly shut thanks to racism and sexism. She continued to be cited as one of the earliest African-American composers to achieve nationwide acclaim in the US, but performances, publications and recordings of her work remained rare.

Happily, a revival is now underway. Price’s First and Third Symphonies were issued in an impressive scholarly edition in 2008. The following year a batch of manuscript scores, long believed to have been lost, were discovered by the new owners of the composer’s former summer home in St Anne, Illinois. In exploring her music, on stage and in the studio, Yannick Nézet-Séguin and The Philadelphia Orchestra aim to help restore Price to her rightful place among other leading twentieth-century American composers.

The conductor sums up this desire with reference to the Third Symphony: “I hope when we play it … and as other orchestras play it, one day – and hopefully sooner rather than later – it will become as familiar and as much part of the canon and part of who we are as an orchestra as any other symphony by Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff.”

The Philadelphia Orchestra
Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conductor

Yannick Nézet-Séguin
The Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of the Orchestre Métropolitain since 2000, Yannick Nézet-Séguin signed a “lifelong” commitment with the Orchestre in September 2019. In September 2018, he became the third Music Director of the Metropolitan Opera (Met), New York in addition to his ongoing duties as Music Director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, where he has served since 2012. In 2016-2017, he became a lifetime Honorary Member of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. After a ten-year tenure with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, he was appointed Honorary Conductor in 2018, a position he holds to this day.

He has worked regularly with many leading European ensembles and enjoyed many close collaborations with the Berliner Philharmoniker, the Wiener Philharmoniker, Sinfonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunk and Chamber Orchestra of Europe as well as the London Philharmonic Orchestra, of which he was Principal Guest Conductor from 2008 to 2014. His opera interpretations have been acclaimed in many of the world’s most famous houses, including the Metropolitan Opera (New York), La Scala (Milan), and the Royal Opera House (London), in the Salzburg Festival, as well as in such renowned concert halls as the Musikverein (Vienna), the Concertgebouw (Amsterdam), theFestspielhaus (Baden-Baden) and the Carnegie Hall (New York).

Yannick Nézet-Séguin records exclusively for Deutsche Grammophon label while continuing his role in the collaborative partnership between ATMA Classique and the OM. His honours include being named Artist of the Year by the prestigious magazine Musical America and receiving the Virginia Parker Award, a Royal Philharmonic Society Award (London), Canada’s National Arts Centre Award (Ottawa), the Prix Denise-Pelletier, awarded by the Quebec government, the Medal of Honor of the National Assembly of Quebec, the Oskar Morawetz Award and Orchestras Canada’s Betty Webster Award, the Rubies Award by Opera Canada; in 2022, he receives the Grammy Award of the Best Orchestral Performance for Florence Price’s Symphony No. 3 with the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Yannick Nézet-Séguin holds seven honorary doctorates (Université du Québec à Montréal, 2011; Curtis Institute of Music, Philadelphia, 2014; Rider University, Princeton, 2015; McGill University, Montreal, 2017, Université de Montréal, 2017; Pennsylvania University, 2018; Université Laval, 2021) and has been made a Companion of the Order of Canada (2012), Companion of the Quebec Order for the Arts and Literature (2015), Officer of the National Order of Quebec (2015), Officer of the Ordre de Montréal (2017), honorary member of the Royal Conservatory of Music (2020) and Officer of the French Republic Order for the Arts and Literature (2021).

This album contains no booklet.