Piano Music of Florence Price at SFIPF

Last night’s program in the fourth annual season of the San Francisco International Piano Festival (SFIPF) consisted of two independent sets. The second was a Bach recital given by Owen Zhou during the 2018 Festival; but I concentrated my attention on the first set, which was a return solo appearance by Nicholas Phillips. Like the #45miniatures Project program that Phillips presented this past Tuesday evening, last night’s live stream consisted of ten pre-recorded videos, this time post-processed with the titles of each of the offerings. The overall title of the program was Piano Music of Florence Price.

The major work on the program was Price’s only piano sonata in the key of E minor. Composed in 1932, the piece is, in many ways, a reflection on the bravura displays of technique that were so popular during the nineteenth century. The attentive listener will probably recognize that Price had a clear grasp of the high bar set by Franz Liszt. However, much of her thematic material was grounded in American rhetoric. She may not have appropriated specific tunes the way Charles Ives did so frequently; but there was a decided “American spirit” behind all of her melodic lines, even if the harmonizing and embellishments could all be tracked by to European sources. Both the overall architecture and the motivic details can be compared to Price’s approaches to composing symphonies; but the sonata was clearly written with the piano in mind (and the technique of a virtuoso pianist).

Phillips clearly understood both the theory and the practice behind the performance of this sonata. None of Price’s lush embellishments were short-changed; but Phillips consistently gave a clear account of the thematic material that provided the foundations for those embellishments. Some might have felt that the durations of those embellishments tended towards the excessive, but Phillips knew how to pace each of the three sonata movements to get beyond creating any impressions of self-indulgence.

The sonata was preceded by seven of the many short works for solo piano that Price composed. One might think of the Songs without Words compositions of Felix Mendelssohn or the Lyric Pieces of Edvard Grieg. However, Price had her own distinctive approach to providing intimate accounts of scaled-down thematic material. I have written in the past about Lara Downes’ recordings of such short compositions, but all of Phillips’ selections were new to me. The post-processed titles for these selections were not always correct; but it will be easy for the listener to recognize that the list on the YouTube Web page provided a reverse-order account of what  Phillips played. (Similarly, the title for the concluding Scherzo movement of the sonata mistakenly repeated the title for the opening movement.)

On the whole Phillips provided a perceptive and engaging account of Price’s skills in composing for solo piano, yet another opportunity to appreciate the diversity of this composer’s talents.