Concert IV
Thursday, February 24, 2022
Heart of the Strings: hidden beauty

Concert 7:30 p.m.

Featuring the exhilarating voice and hidden beauty of a lesser-known string, the viola.

Program

Florence Price – Concert Overture No. 2 (1943)

Based on three spirituals, “Go Down Moses,” “Ev’ry Time I Feel the Spirit,”
“Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen”

Joseph Haydn – Symphony No. 88 in G Major

York Bowen – Viola Concerto in C Minor, Op. 25          

   Julian Tello Jr., viola soloist

Florence Price – Concert Overture No. 2 

For many of us, our introduction to the remarkable music of Florence Price (1887-1953) is a regrettably recent experience. Florence Smith grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, in a mixed-race family. She studied music from early youth and went on to earn degrees from the New England Conservatory. She returned to the South and married Thomas Price, but a growing Jim Crow climate drove them to Chicago. There she encountered and found artistic stimulus from the Chicago Black Renaissance, which included writers, artists, and musicians.

Price studied at several Chicago universities and worked seriously on composition. Her first symphony won a Wanamaker Foundation Award and was performed in 1933 by the Chicago Symphony, the first work by a Black woman to be performed by a major American orchestra. During the 1930s and 1940s, many of her works were performed by orchestras in the region, and Price was inducted into ASCAP in 1940. She died in 1953 at age 66.

Although Price had composed a massive amount of music (four symphonies, four concerti, numerous songs, chamber, piano, and organ works), her compositions slipped from public attention for several decades. Long after her death, a trove of her compositions was found in 2009 in a small house where she typically summered. This large body of work, including her acclaimed Fourth Symphony, introduced the music world anew to a distinctive musician who blended the language of the classical European tradition with strong elements of her African American idiom and its rhythmic focus.

Price’s Concert Overture No. 2 is based on three familiar spirituals, “Go Down, Moses,” “Ev’ry Time I Feel the Spirit,” and “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” Here the spiritual melodies are all rendered clearly and their themes are also intertwined with one another in masterful fashion.

Haydn – Symphony No. 88 in G Major

Franz Josef “Papa” Haydn (1732-1809), that prolific, long-lived model of the productive musician, composed 104 symphonies over his career. His musical talent was identified early, and he was sent from home at six for training, ultimately arriving at St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, an important musical center. His career in the boys’ choir, however, was curtailed by his voice changing and tendency to pranks. Thereafter, Haydn spent some years piecing together a meager living as a performer, while studying composition largely independently.

Haydn’s early compositions earned him attention and led to full-time employment as musical director, first for a Count Morzin and then, for nearly 30 years, for the wealthy Esterhazy family. There, in rural  Austria and then Hungary, Haydn conducted a small orchestra, performed, and composed. In time, he acquired the right to receive his own commissions and to own those compositions, which saw him turning from the operas favored by Esterhazy to chamber music and symphonies. His contributions to the development of the string quartet and the symphony have earned him the title of the “father” of these forms, though their parentage was much broader.

In 1790, Haydn’s role with the Esterhazys ended (though later resumed under easier terms), but he now had an international reputation, especially popular in England. Two extended visits there were creative and enjoyable times for him, inspiring some of his finest late symphonies. In Vienna too, he was lionized. Having begun as a young composer as the Baroque style was fading, Haydn, in his long career gave shape to the Classical style, with its attention to balance and proportion, a music often enlivened by his wit and sense of humor. Symphony #88 is a later work that offers us these traits, a jewel in his tiara of 104 gems.

intermission

York Bowen – Viola Concerto in C Minor, Op. 25 (viola soloist Julian Tello) 

https://youtu.be/e0KcjtdGd2I

Edwin York Bowen (1884-1961) was a highly praised English composer in the early part of the twentieth century, but his name is largely lost in our time as a contemporary of Elgar, Holst, and Vaughan Williams. However, he was a prolific composer of symphonies and concerti as well as a distinguished pianist and talented performer on other instruments.

Bowen’s musical talents were recognized early and supported. He completed studies at the Royal Academy of Music, where later he served as professor. His works included many for individual instruments (piano, horn, violin, viola) either as solos, concerti, or in small chamber ensembles. Bowen’s preference for the tone qualities of the viola was well known, and the C Minor concerto is one of his best-known works.

The years prior to the First World War witnessed Bowen’s greatest public recognition. In later years, his Romantic style, which fundamentally respects the diatonic idiom, whether major or minor, was seen by many, influenced by everything from jazz to 12-tone experimentalism, as old-fashioned. Only very late in his life, as well as after his death, did he receive further attention, but even today many of his compositions have not been published.