Florence Price: Piano Concerto in One Movement; Symphony No. 1 in E Minor

Jeneba Kanneh-Mason does things differently. Instead of making her recording debut with a popular concerto, she’s instead gone for a work that even 10 years ago was barely known. The Piano Concerto by the American composer Florence Price (1887-1953) was largely forgotten after its premiere in 1934. The full score was lost and the original orchestral parts were made public only in 2020. Jeneba Kanneh-Mason—then aged just 19—gave its first-ever performance at the BBC Proms in 2021. The orchestra on that occasion (and now on Kanneh-Mason’s recording) was Chineke!, the London-based ensemble founded in 2015 to boost BAME representation in British classical music. “This piece really is unique,” Kanneh-Mason says of the Concerto. “Although Florence Price called it Piano Concerto in One Movement, there are three distinct movements. The first is very romantic and the main subject—where the orchestra plays first, and then the piano comes in second—is just so beautiful and warm. The second movement is serene and peaceful and still; there’s a duet between oboe and piano that works really well. And the last movement is a lot of fun! It’s jazzy and fast, and great to play with an orchestra.” That last movement is a Juba—a dance rooted in Price’s mixed-race heritage. “It’s a traditional African American folk dance,” says Kanneh-Mason, who’s played the concerto throughout her solo career. She’s seen it emerge from obscurity, right up to the moment when she performed it for a global broadcast audience in the vast space of the Royal Albert Hall. “I’ve played quite a few different editions and the one on this recording is the most recent. But every time I come back to it, I discover something new. There’s quite a strong jazz element in the second movement, which I try to bring to life a bit more every time. And the first movement cadenza is such a dramatic opening to the piece. I’ve been working on making that as grand as possible.” The second half of the album is devoted to Price’s Symphony No. 1, a piece that shares both its key and some of its opening musical ideas with Dvorák’s “New World” Symphony. There’s a breezy optimism to both the first movement “Allegro” and the irrepressible third movement “Juba Dance”, while the “Finale” is infused with the flavours of spirituals, once again reminiscent of Dvorák. The album ends with the second movement of Price’s orchestral suite Ethiopia’s Shadow in America, a musical commentary on 18th- and 19th-century slavery in the US.