Pine Updates Black Composers Album

courtesy of Crossover Media

In 1997 Cedille Records released an album of violinist Rachel Barton Pine performing concertante compositions by three black composers. The earliest selection was a violin concerto by Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, the second of the six concertos in his Opus 5 collection, written in the key of A major. This was followed by two works from the second half of the nineteenth century. The earlier of these was a three-movement concerto by José White Lafitte, composed in 1864. This was followed by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s single-movement romance in G major, completed in 1899. All three of these selections were recorded with the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestras’ Encore Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Daniel Hege.

At the beginning of last month, this album was reissued with an additional track, which advanced the scope of the album into the twentieth century. The additional selection was Florence Price’s second violin concerto, which she completed in 1952. For this recording, Pine performed with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (RSNO), conducted by Jonathan Heyward. As of this writing, it appears that the best (if not the only) way to purchase either a physical CD or a digital download is through a Web page on the Cedille Web site.

As I have previously observed, my awareness of Saint-Georges goes all the way back to my student days, when I encountered him on a Musical Heritage Society album released as part of a series entitled Of Castles and Cathedrals. Since then, any further encounter with the composer was “a sometime thing;” but I have been cheered by the recent increased attention to his compositions. Coleridge-Taylor has also benefitted from the attention shift. However, what interests me most about this reissue is the addition of the Price concerto to the repertoire.

Readers may recall that violinist Randall Goosby brought that Price concerto to the first San Francisco Symphony program following the Opening Night activities at the beginning of this season. While my interest in her work had much to do with Rae Linda Brown’s biography of Price, that book was completed before the discovery of previously unknown manuscripts in 2009. The Price second concerto was in that trove of manuscripts, and it revealed aspects of her imagination that Brown’s biography had not documented. For example, the concerto begins with the celesta playing fortissimo, the first in a series of gestures revealing just how imaginative Price could be in her instrumentation. Those startling qualities are just as startling under Heyward’s leadership of the RSNO.

From a personal point of view, my primary “journey of discovery” involved the Lafitte concerto. Ironically, his Wikipedia page cites two recordings of that concerto, Pine’s 1997 performance being the more recent. However, recordings of any other compositions are not mentioned (perhaps because they do not exist). As a result, while Pine became my “first contact” source for Lafitte, she remains my only source; and I hope that, in this “new age” of broadening the repertoire, there will be further contacts in the not-too-distant future.