For the nation’s 250th anniversary, Chicago’s Grant Park Orchestra has spent its summer festival surveying the American classical music tradition. The ensemble’s music directors have long possessed an appetite for discovery, unearthing obscure or overlooked corners of the repertoire. But the American works that have graced the Pritzker Pavilion in recent weeks suggest that this adventurous orchestra can still find fresh terrain to explore.
Wednesday evening offered a rich example of this. Guest conductor Jeri Lynne Johnson led a program that opened with William Grant Still’s Festive Overture, continued with Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major, featuring pianist Michelle Cann, and concluded with Florence Price’s Third Symphony. Taken together, these works chart a Black American musical lineage in the first half of the twentieth century.
Ravel’s concerto is an unusual addition to the Grant Park Orchestra’s American survey. But though the composer was French, his 1928 tour of the United States fundamentally shaped the work. Jazz’s syncopations and colors seeped into the score, lending it an American accent that almost erases its Gallic origins. The first movement especially captures this hybrid energy. One could almost mistake passages for Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, completed just three years earlier. In fact, Ravel and Gershwin were working in parallel, each discovering in American jazz a way to refresh the European classical tradition.
Cann understood this duality intuitively. Her playing was crisp and angular where the score demanded brightness, then pivoting to soft and elusive tones elsewhere. She never let one element overwhelm the other, allowing the piece to breathe as both French salon music and American vernacular idiom. The Grant Park Orchestra matched her intelligence, capturing Ravel’s jazzy inflections without caricature.
Price’s Third Symphony draws from a different thread of our national musical heritage. Her symphonic language was shaped in part by Antonín Dvořák, who famously urged American composers to look to Black spirituals for inspiration. The recent rediscovery of Price has been a major boon for the classical world. Her accomplishment is undeniable, especially given the institutional racism and sexism that constrained her career. And now her works can – and are – shaping the current generation of American classical talent.
Yet, aspects of Price’s music can feel at times frustrating. For thirty minutes, the Third Symphony remains mostly in a low gear. It rarely reaches moments of high excitement, instead unfolding through episodes colored by African American folk idioms. Its orchestral palette is dominated by dark, mysterious colors, which makes it more of an acquired taste. If the Ravel was snappy, Price’s symphony felt like a languorous, humid Chicago summer evening. Yet under Johnson’s baton, the orchestra skillfully gave generous shape and burnish to these weighty melodies.
Still’s Festive Overture, written four years after Price’s third, threw this contrast into sharp relief. The two were contemporaries, yet Still received far greater institutional support. His overture wears its influences openly, echoing the breezy idioms of newsreel scores and light classical music. Where Price is ruminative, Still is extroverted. Where Still confidently inhabits the musical language of his moment, Price charts a more solitary path out of necessity.
How Price might have developed as a composer had her music been regularly championed by the likes of Serge Koussevitzky or Artur Rodziński remains a tantalizing, ‘What if?’ Frequent performances build a composer’s confidence and establish a vital performance tradition. Greater advocacy might also have accelerated the rise of Black and female classical musicians decades earlier. It is perhaps a bittersweet exercise to imagine this world. Yet on this milestone national anniversary, it is nonetheless worth considering, even amid the backdrop of celebrating what we have regained today.
Originally published at Seen and Heard International
Around Chicago
Tim Sawyier, Chicago Classical Review
“The brass chorale of the opening Andante seems to channel Tristan und Isolde before giving way to an Allegro that ultimately feels tentative, never pushing any idea too far. One can hear Price’s struggle for recognition and concern for staying in her era’s stylistic confines, but this does not necessarily make for engaging material. The lyrical second theme is affecting, but feels obviously derivative of the famous Largo from Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony.”
Louis Harris, Third Coast Review
“Johnson discussed how this concerto integrates the orchestra and piano, with several members of the orchestra getting lengthy solos. After a loud crack from a slapstick, Michelle Cann showed off light and forceful technique from the opening rills of Allegramente. Soloists Jennifer Lawson, Anne Bach, David Gordon, and guest concertmaster Ilana Setapen played their first of many solos on picolo, English horn, trumpet, and violin, respectively. Especially cool was Lynn Williams playing the harp playing in transition in the opening movement. Musically, the opening movement is a romp, and Cann’s hands just bounced off the keyboard.”
Michelle Cann plays Price’s Sonata in E minor
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