​Program Notes

By Laurie Shulman

 

Andante moderato from String Quartet in G Major

Florence Price

Born 9 April 1887 in Little Rock, Arkansas

Died 3 June 1953 in Chicago

 

• Price was the first female Black American composer to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra

• Her music synthesizes spirituals and African-American popular music with classical tradition

• Her friends included singer Marian Anderson and composer William Dawson

• Her father was Little Rock, Arkansas’ only Black dentist; her mother taught music

 

The music of Florence Price is appearing with increasing frequency on American concert programs. She achieved renown and celebrity in the 1930s along with her Black contemporaries William Grant Still and William Dawson; collectively, they are the principal classical music figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Between 1930 and 1950, Price was the best known female African-American composer in America. Many of her compositions were thought lost for much of the 20th century, however, and her work fell into obscurity. A trove of manuscripts surfaced in 1980, helping to draw attention to Price’s achievement. Today, her music is getting a considerable amount of well-deserved attention.

 

Her story is remarkable. She performed in public at age 4 and published her first composition when she was 11. She was accepted to New England Conservatory at 16, studying composition, piano, and organ. After teaching in Little Rock and Atlanta for several years, she left the South for Chicago, pursuing additional study at Chicago Musical College and the American Conservatory. By the 1920s, Price’s music was attracting favorable notice and winning awards. Her breakthrough came in 1932, when she earned first prize in the Wanamaker competition for her Symphony in E minor. Chicago Symphony conductor Frederick Stock took note and premiered that work in 1933. He also encouraged her to write a piano concerto. The American contralto Marian Anderson incorporated two of Price’s arrangements of spirituals into her repertoire, enhancing Price’s reputation. Florence Price continued to teach and compose until her death in 1953.               

 

Black spirituals and African-American hymns make frequent appearances in Price’s music. Her 1929 String Quartet in G major – restricted to two movements – is a fine example, particularly its songful second movement. We hear it today in an arrangement for string orchestra. Listening, one could easily mistake it for a movement by Dvořák. The melodies, while tinged with pentatonic flavor, are clearly linked to late Romanticism, and staunchly tonal. A lively middle section in minor mode features pizzicato writing and a playful mood, but the reprise of Price’s lovely opening Andante will tug at your heartstrings.

 

The score calls for strings.

 

Concerto in A minor for violoncello and orchestra, Op.129

Robert Schumann

Born 8 June, 1810 in Zwickau, Germany

Died 29 July 1856 in Endenich, Germany

 

• As in Schumann’s Piano Concerto, the soloist enters almost immediately

• The three movements are played without pause

• Schumann plumbed the cello’s soulfulness and warmth

• Listen for a solo cello in the orchestra - and an accompanied cadenza for the soloist

 

Schumann's Cello Concerto dates from October 1850, shortly after Robert and Clara Schumann moved their growing family to Düsseldorf so that he could assume the music directorship of the city’s orchestra. Their hopes were high for the new position, which would finally give Robert the chorus and orchestra he had sought for so long. Sadly, his stint in Düsseldorf ended four years later in the tragedy of his attempted suicide. At first, however, he was warmly received.  Düsseldorf's enthusiastic welcome catalyzed a burst of creativity. Within a couple of months he produced the Cello Concerto, the "Rhenish" Symphony, Op.97, most of his music for Goethe’s Faust, and a number of songs. 

 

Opus 129 is a deceptively late opus number for this work. It is a consequence of the arduous road the cello concerto traveled prior to its posthumous publication in full score in 1883. (A cello-piano reduction of the score appeared in August 1854.) Similarly, the circumstances of the first performance remain cloaked in some uncertainty. The piano/cello version may have been performed in 1860 -- four years after the composer's death -- but the first reliably documented performances with cello soloist and full orchestra did not take place until 1867.

 

Just as it took a long time for this work to be published, so the Cello Concerto has had difficulty in establishing itself firmly in the repertoire.  Schumann's own list of compositions calls the concerto a Konzertstück, which can mean "concerto-piece" or "concert-piece." By this categorization he was perhaps indicating that he recognized in the piece a major stylistic and formal departure from examples by his eighteenth-century predecessors. 

 

Several bold musical gestures differentiate the piece from earlier instrumental concertos. As in Schumann's Piano Concerto, Op. 54, the soloist enters immediately, without an extended orchestral exposition. Though the work is in three movements, there is no pause between them. Schumann's transitions are imaginative and seamless, and the emotional integrity of the work remains undisturbed. The cadenza is in the third movement, rather than the first, and it is accompanied by orchestra, a brilliant tactic that succeeds in further unifying the work. 

 

Schumann had played cello briefly in 1832, after he was forced to shelve his keyboard career because of permanent injury to his right hand. Consequently he understood the cello, and was able to compose idiomatically for the instrument. He was sympathetic to the problems a tenor-voiced instrument would face in order to project over full orchestra. One of the great achievements of the piece is Schumann's success in saving the soloist from "burial" in the mass of orchestral sound.

 

With Haydn and Boccherini as his chief predecessors in the realm of the solo cello concerto, Schumann looked to a fine but distant tradition. This work established a new romantic model for the genre. As Alfred Nieman has so eloquently observed, "Here is the distilled essence of Schumann. It is a song for 'cello, bringing to the surface the dreamer that is in us all."

 

The Cello Concerto is scored for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, trumpets, and trombones; timpani, solo cello and strings.

 

Symphony No. 1 in C, Op. 21

Ludwig van Beethoven

Born 16 December, 1770 in Bonn, Germany

Died 26 March, 1827 in Vienna, Austria

 

• Beethoven was already an experienced composer when this symphony appeared in 1800

• Slow introductions precede the first and last movements of this symphony

• Beethoven the humorist is in full flower

• Listen for woodwind choirs and solos; they pop up all over the place

 

Beethoven's first symphony was completed and premiered on 2 April, 1800, on a program that also included the Septet, Op. 20, and (or it seems likely) the Viennese premiere of his First Piano Concerto. The young German had initially established his reputation as a pianist in the 1790s. This concert was a turning point in his career, decisively shifting his image in Vienna to composer. Indeed, Beethoven found himself in the enviable position of being the most prominent composer in Vienna after Haydn -- and Haydn, at the age of 68, was an exceedingly old man by the standard of the day. 

 

It is apparent from Beethoven’s sketches that he had worked on this first symphony for several years beforehand. No doubt he recognized that his work would be compared to the symphonies of his famous contemporaries, who had their advocates in the Austrian capital. The eminent British musicologist Donald Francis Tovey called this work "a fitting farewell to the eighteenth century," and Beethoven certainly drew upon the lessons he had learned from the symphonies of Mozart, Haydn and others.

 

To a listener who knows the Eroica, Pastorale, and Choral symphonies, Beethoven's First sounds traditional, almost conservative. In fact, it was regarded as innovative, even daring, when it was first performed. Both the first and last movements have slow introductions that sound as if they are in another key in their opening measures. Especially for the opening of a symphony, this was adventurous indeed. Another startling innovation was Beethoven's use of timpani in the slow movement. Contemporaries also noted the extensive use of woodwinds throughout the symphony.

 

The third movement, though entitled Menuetto, races along with the sparkle and momentum of a scherzo. It is the minuet of the Haydn symphonies in name only. Papa Haydn's influence is more discernible in the country dance finale. The first violins tease us with a tentative ascending scale, inching up one step further each time it is reiterated. Finally the full octave is achieved, and the slow tempo abandoned in favor of a high-spirited frolic. Audiences in Beethoven's time were moved to laughter by this sly musical joke. It is easy to understand why the First Symphony was among the most popular of Beethoven's works during his lifetime.

 

Beethoven scored his First Symphony similarly to the late symphonies of Mozart and Haydn, with the addition of clarinets.  He called for woodwinds, horns and trumpets in pairs;  timpani and strings.

 

Program Notes by Laurie Shulman ©2025

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