Catalyst Concludes Series with Florence Price

Catalyst Quartet members Karlos Rodriguez, Paul Laraia, Abi Fayette, and Karla Donehew Perez, photograph by Ricardo Quinones, courtesy of San Francisco Performances)

Last night in Herbst Theatre, the Catalyst Quartet (violinists Karla Donehew Perez and Abi Fayette, violist Paul Laraia, and cellist Karlos Rodriguez) concluded their Uncovered series, which they curated for San Francisco Performances. The program was devoted entirely to the music for Florence Price, drawing upon selections from the second volume in their UNCOVERED series of albums released by Azica Records. That album consisted of six compositions, four of which received world premiere recordings, one of which was labeled as unfinished, and another as “possibly unfinished.”

The first half of last night’s program was devoted to the unfinished works. The two-movement string quartet in G major held the “unfinished” label, while the three-movement quintet for piano and strings in E minor included the modifier (“likely” in the program book, rather than “possibly” on the album). For the latter, Catalyst was joined by pianist Michelle Cann. Cann also contributed to the final selection of the evening, the four-movement A minor quintet, which was preceded by Negro Folksongs in Counterpoint. That latter was one of the world premiere selections on the album, only recently discovered in contrast to the previously published Five Folksongs in Counterpoint, which Catalyst performed this past November and seems to be establishing a prominent position in the current string quartet canon.

Last night’s Folksongs offering was a high-point in the entire program. To say that Price commanded a solid knowledge base of polyphony would be the height of understatement. The advantage of harnessing that talent in the interest of familiar tunes allows the listener to appreciate just how sophisticated her technique could be. There were any number of familiar call-and-response gestures; but these were all based on the motifs that serve to identify the spirituals themselves. The tune itself is never unfolded in its entirety. Rather, the polyphonic strategy often allows the listeners to experience all of the individual phrases of a spiritual at the same time, what one might call an experience of transcendent spirituality!

Those that have been following Price’s work through this site probably know by now that her “classical” four-movement structures almost always substitute a Juba movement where earlier composers would have placed a Scherzo or Minuet. Last night the only such movement appeared in the A minor piano quintet. Ironically, it was followed by a Scherzo serving as the final movement, almost as if Price had tried to convene a “meeting of minds.” In the past I have noted the probability that she had been influenced by the symphonies of Antonín Dvořák, and that influence rears its head in this quintet as often as it does in her own symphonies.

The opening two selections tended to serve as a “warm-up” for listening to the more sophisticated offerings of the second half of the program. One gets the impression that Price was experimenting with different techniques of synthesizing her studies of European traditions with the immediacy of her personal experiences. In last night’s program, one could almost believe that Catalyst chose to play these fragments to introduce different elements of Price’s approaches to compositions, both technical and rhetorical. Once that introduction had been established, the attentive listener would be better equipped to follow (not to mention enjoy) the offerings that followed the intermission.