Yannick Nézet-Séguin Conductor
Price Symphony No. 4
Rachmaninoff Symphony No. 2
This concert continues Yannick and the Orchestra’s exploration of the music of Florence Price, whose music was lost to generations and has only recently come to be considered some of the greatest of 20th-century American music. Although she composed more than 400 works, most of it was never publicly performed; in a letter to famed conductor Serge Koussevitsky, Price wrote, “I have two handicaps—those of sex and race.” Price’s Fourth Symphony, written in 1945, was presumed lost until discovered among a nest of her papers in an abandoned house that had once been her summer home. In this, her final symphony, Price incorporates melodies from spirituals, including a beautifully orchestrated theme from “Wade in the Water,” and the third movement embraces a traditional Juba dance—a syncopated stamping, clapping movement to a rhythm that was a precursor to ragtime.
Sergei Rachmaninoff’s lushly textured, warm, and melodious Second Symphony was an enduring favorite that Rachmaninoff conducted with The Philadelphia Orchestra in its U.S. premiere in 1909.