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player ready...The Evanston Symphony Orchestra Director Lawrence Eckerling said the orchestra hopes to shine a light on female musicians this coming season and its first concert of the season is no exception.
On Oct. 30, the orchestra will play Florence Price’s third symphony accompanied by the works of Leonard Bernstein and Sergei Rachmaninoff.
Price is the first female African American composer to have her work played by a major symphony when her first symphony premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1933.
Her work has seen a popularity surge in recent years, especially as music industry experts noticed diversity may be resulting in the industry’s demise. However, this surge did not come without decades of programming neglect, Eckerling said.
“There has been a neglect of African American composers and people tend to program what is familiar to them and what they think is going to sell,” Eckerling said. “There are a lot of reasons why something doesn’t get played.”
Eckerling said Price’s limited presence has allowed the orchestra to create their own interpretations, rather than following a precedent set by decades, if not centuries, of performance practice.
“A symphony may have 50 to 100 commercial recordings on the market and for this symphony, there’s around three,” he said. “It’s only in the last few years that the symphony is getting played. So what I’m getting at is there is no or not enough of performance history (to set a standard way of playing the piece.)”
The piece’s third movement, referred to as “Juba” and named after a dance derived from the culture of enslaved African people, is an example. Price wrote during the Harlem Renaissance, a defining moment in Black American arts and culture, and put hints of the Black American experience into traditionally white American and European classical music.
During the Harlem Renaissance, some predominant figures, such as Marcus Garvey, believed Black artists should refer to their “African” culture when creating art. Some composers and artists like Price who had lived in the United States their entire lives wanted to portray the Black American experience instead, leading to the incorporation of influences like “Juba” into her work.
This movement is where Eckerling said the orchestra got to create its own interpretation considering the piece’s limited performance standard.
“If it’s not too fast and a little bit slower, (you can see) there’s a relationship between the style of the Scott Joplin rags and the Price symphony,” Eckerling said. “When she wants to get very dark and brooding, she sounds like Wagner. Sometimes she employs whole-tone scales when she wants to get dreamy. In the other movements, while they aren’t literally spirituals, they might as well be because that’s the source material.”
Price was born in Arkansas but spent a significant portion of her life in the Chicagoland. Eckerling said some of Price’s scores were discovered in a Kankakee, Ill. house after she passed away.
The program will also feature Sergei Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” and pianist Inna Faliks. She is the head of piano studies at the University of California, Los Angeles but grew up in the Chicagoland and had her Chicago Symphony Orchestra debut while still a teenager, according to her biography.
Erckerling said Rachmaninoff took a theme from fellow composer Niccolo Paganini and put it through several variations, making his Rhapsody a piece of its own.
“One of the variations — the 18th variation — that people know and love is this beautiful tune in D-flat major,” Eckerling said. “Basically it is an inversion (a flipped, upside-down version) of the original Paganini theme and it’s just ingenious. I would bet that there are some people that will come to the concert just to hear that.”
Rachmaninoff puts the “Dies Irae” theme into a couple of variations, according to Eckerling. The “Dies Irae” theme is commonly associated with death and can be found in several films, such as “Lion King.”
“I have a humorous take on this piece,” he said. “It’s so hard that if you want to try and play my piece, here’s to the death of you … but nobody really knows but it’s there.”
The orchestra will also play “Symphonic Dances from West Side Story” by Leonard Bernstein, highlighting key moments from the New York City musical.
Tickets for the Oct. 30, 2:30 p.m. show are available on the Evanston Symphony Orchestra’s website or by calling the office at (847) 864-8804. Eckerling said COVID-19 precautions are in place with mask and vaccination requirements.
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Corey Schmidt is a freelance reporter with Pioneer Press.