The New Jersey Symphony and new recordings add to the profile of an African-American composer whose work languished for decades

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By Brian Wise

Dec. 5, 2018

Newark, N.J.

In 2016 the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra showed its willingness to breach classical music’s entrenched gender barriers with the appointment of Xian Zhang as its music director. It did so again last Thursday, when it presented the Piano Concerto in D Minor by the elusive, African-American composer Florence Price, whose music is being rediscovered after more than six decades of obscurity following her death in 1953, at the age of 66.

Price was a prolific musician who left at least 250 works, including symphonies, keyboard pieces and songs, according to music publisher G. Schirmer, which in November acquired the global performance rights to her catalog. In 1933, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra presented her Symphony in E Minor, making her the first African-American woman to have a work performed by a major U.S. orchestra.

A few other champions followed, including the contralto Marian Anderson, who toured with Price’s songs, and the British conductor John Barbirolli, who commissioned a suite for strings for England’s Hallé Orchestra.

Born in 1887 to a middle-class family in Little Rock, Ark., Price received musical training from her mother, a piano teacher. At age 16, she entered the New England Conservatory, where she studied piano and organ. After returning to Little Rock, she was denied admittance to the Arkansas State Music Teachers Association because of her race. Settling with her family in Chicago, Price made connections with leading figures in the black intelligentsia, including the writer Langston Hughes. She won multiple prizes for black musicians, wrote radio jingles and arranged spirituals, which both Anderson and the soprano Leontyne Price presented at Carnegie Hall. But though the composer’s musical style had broad appeal and craftsmanship, she also encountered resistance.

After Price’s death, her modest renown faded. Then, in 2009, 19 boxes of her musical manuscripts, audiotapes and personal papers were discovered by an Illinois couple renovating an abandoned house near Chicago; the house had at one time been Price’s summer retreat. The recovery, and growing numbers of recordings and performances, has brought prospects for a larger Price resurgence. But impediments remain.

At the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, Joshua Weilerstein, a keen Price enthusiast, conducted her 1934 piano concerto with Aaron Diehl as the soloist. Like several of Price’s symphonic works, the single-movement concerto is rooted in a 19th-century tonality and structure; it echoes Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony in the way it draws on the brooding gestures and modal inflections of African-American spirituals. The concerto is also indebted to Rachmaninoff, with passages of searching grandeur, and balances can easily turn mushy. In this regard, the performance fell short, as Mr. Diehl was at times overwhelmed by the lush orchestral fabric.

Mr. Diehl and colleagues were most persuasive in the concerto’s final section, which is based on a juba, an African-American traditional dance favored by Price. Its syncopated contours and rat-a-tat percussion part bring to mind a Scott Joplin rag, and here Mr. Diehl applied a playful finesse.

It’s difficult to draw too many conclusions about Price’s concerto, as its original orchestration has been lost; the New Jersey Symphony performed a reconstruction by Drew University scholar Trevor Weston, based on two piano rehearsal scores and written notes. Evidently, this reflects the state of a number of Price scores. Schirmer officials say they have been acquiring and preparing materials from a handful of scholarly sources, including the University of Arkansas libraries, which now house the trove discovered near Chicago.

Despite the rough state of some materials, there are a growing number of Price recordings, most recently “Songs From Chicago” (Cedille Records), by the American baritone Thomas Hampson. With pianist Kuang-Hao Huang, Mr. Hampson offers an eloquent, supple performance of two of Price’s settings of Hughes poems: the soaring and bittersweet “Songs to the Dark Virgin,” and “My Dream,” a lilting waltz that envisions a more carefree existence, freed from racial prejudice.

Among the recovered works are the Violin Concertos Nos. 1 and 2, which violinist Er-Gene Kahng, conductor Ryan Cockerham and the Janáček Philharmonic released earlier this year for Albany Records. In the First Concerto, from 1939, Price still adheres to a 19th-century concerto format, with quicksilver solo passages offset by a touchingly nostalgic second movement (and given a lustrous reading by Ms. Kahng). The Second Violin Concerto, completed in 1952, is more experimental. Its procession of march rhythms, dark woodwind colorings and angular piano interjections has a cinematic quality that suggests Price’s early work as an organist for silent films.

If there’s a popular favorite in the Price catalog, the Symphony No. 1 is surfacing as a front-runner. January will bring a performance by the Minnesota Orchestra and a new recording on Naxos by the Fort Smith Symphony, in Arkansas.