Naxos to Release Choral Works of Florence Price

I cannot remember when I first became aware of composer Florence Price, but I am pretty sure it was after I made my move from research in Silicon Valley to writing about music. One of my earliest encounters took place during my Examiner.com days when listened to one of her compositions for organ performed by Paul Jacobs in January of 2012. In August of 2020, I wrote about Rae Linda Brown’s biography The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price and felt a bit frustrated this morning when I could not find the book on any of my many shelves! My most recent encounter took place this past April, when, as the encore for his San Francisco Performances debut, violinist Randall Goosby played Price’s “Elfentanz.”

Cover of the latest Naxos album of music by Florence Price (photograph from the Special Collections division of the University of Alabama Libraries in Fayetteville, restoration and colorization provided by Memory Cherish)

Price has received a rather generous amount of attention from the Naxos American Classics series. My last encounter with those albums came in November of 2022 with the third release of her orchestral music, entitled Songs of the Oak. As I observed at that time, John Jeter has been the conductor on those releases; but each of his albums has a different ensemble. The latest release will take place one week from today with Jeter conducting the Malmö Chorus and Orchestra; and, as can easily be guessed, the album is devoted entirely to choral works. It also includes three vocal soloists, soprano Sara Swietlicki, mezzo Lindsay Grace Johnson, and baritone Jonas Samuelsson. As usual, the Amazon.com Web page is processing pre-orders.

I was particularly enthusiastic about choral singing during my secondary school years. It was only when I became a freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that I realized that music would have to take a back seat in my life. However, when I learned about this new release, I found it hard to resist! The album includes Prices’s seven-movement setting of Vachel Lindsay’s poem “Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight,” scored for full orchestra, organ, and mixed chorus. The remainder consists of eleven short choral songs.

Sadly, while the accompanying booklet provides a detailed track list, it does not include any of the texts being sung. Instead, the back cover provides a URL for a PDF of those texts. Rather than forcing the reader to type a long URL, here is the hyperlink for that Web page.