The Philadelphia Orchestra discovers Florence Price once again

Before offering the subscription debut of Florence Price’s Piano Concerto in One Movement with the Philadelphia Orchestra, pianist Lara Downes shared an encouraging anecdote. Speaking to the audience at Marian Anderson Hall, Downes recounted a recent educational visit to a West Philadelphia elementary school, where she found that the students had as much familiarity with Price’s music as they did with Beethoven’s. Credit to Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphians, who have made Price’s rediscovered oeuvre a central pillar of their repertory over the past decade. Credit to Downes as well, whose professional mission includes the rediscovery of neglected Black composers.

The title of the Price piece is a bit of a misnomer: there are actually three movements, given without pause. Each bears the hallmarks of her compositional style, a seamless fusion of Black American musical traditions and typical classical forms. The first movement opens with a call-and-response among the brass and woodwind preceding a spare cadenza, while the second takes a heavy influence from the tone and texture of spirituals. The third incorporates a juba dance, an African-American rhythmic style that features prominently in her four symphonies.

On the podium, Nézet-Séguin balanced rich textures in the brass and woodwind with elegant string tone, supported by vibrant percussion elements. The piece thundered and whispered with equal force. Downes seemed most comfortable in the lyrical central movement – essentially an Adagio – but elsewhere her featherweight sound was often covered by the orchestra. The rhythmic intensity of the cadenza seemed to disappear when the orchestra joined her at full force, and greater contrast would have been welcome in the boisterous juba. Alone at the keyboard, Downes appeared more comfortable in her encore, a soulful performance of the spiritual Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen by HT Burleigh.

The capacity audience got Price and Beethoven, with the Symphony no. 9 in D minor following after intermission. This was a typical Nézet-Séguin performance of Beethoven, which is to say entirely atypical – for better or worse, it was like no Ninth I’d ever heard before. The orchestra crashed through the four movements with the relentless tempi one might expect from a historical outfit, shaving at least ten minutes off the anticipated running time, resulting in a reading that was long on excitement and short of detail. You only noticed individual elements when they were pushed to the limit: I wondered if the oboe, bassoon and horns in the second movement might burst a blood vessel in their cheeks trying to keep up.

If the performance had one unequivocal triumph, it was the Philadelphia Symphonic Choir, who richly intoned Schiller’s message of freedom and fellowship. The vocal soloists offered a distinctly operatic interpretation of the fourth movement’s text, beginning with Ryan McKinney’s stentorian delivery of the “O Freunde” stanza. His authoritative bass-baritone easily filled the hall, though it sounds slightly drained of color. Perhaps a touch of the “Bayreuth Bark” creeping into this Wagnerian’s voice? Issachah Savage balanced heft and lyricism in the tenor’s passage, though text delivery was general. Their female counterparts, soprano Leah Hawkins and mezzo Rihab Chaieb, brought more volume than you typically hear in these assignments, though their style was mostly serviceable. As with the performance overall, the modus operandi appeared to be breadth, not depth.