Centennial Celebration
On November 3rd in Durham’s Carolina Theatre the Durham Symphony Orchestra will present one of its most exciting concerts in recent years. It will be a joyful musical celebration of the centennial of American women’s suffrage. In honor of this event we will be featuring a vocal star of the future, Jemeesa Yarborough. She is the winner of the Stephen/Prystowsky Young Vocalists Award. This award includes a concert with the DSO as well as a two thousand prize donated by Stephen Prystowsky. Dr. Prystowsky is well-known in our local opera community and is a member of the Board of Directors of America’s finest opera institution, the Metropolitan Opera.
IN HONOR OF AMERICAN WOMEN
This concert will feature the DSO’s first performance ever of a symphonic work by a female composer and the first time a female has conducted the DSO on a classical concert.
A highlight of the afternoon will be four selections by the African-American composer Florence Price. Her recent posthumous musical renaissance is one of the most thrilling and poignant stories in American musical history.
Price’s thrilling work “Dances in the Canebrakes” will be conducted by the DSO’s gifted Assistant Conductor, Shelley Livingston.
The program will also include Beethoven’s powerful Overture to “Egmont” and Brahms epic and autumnal Symphony No. 4.
FLORENCE PRICE
The remarkable re-discovery of the music of Florence Price has been the biggest “find” of a composer’s music since the Gustav Mahler centennial in 1960.
She was born in Arkansas in 1883. She was an extremely accomplished organist and was granted admission to the New England Conservatory of Music only because she took her mother’s advice not to acknowledge her race. ( She was very light-skinned and could “pass”.) She was the first African-American woman to write a symphony. This symphony work won a prize in 1933 and was played by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra! It was such a success that she was invited back to play her own piano concerto the following season.
Other works and successes followed. At Marian Anderson’s famous protest concert in front of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 she ended the program with Florence Price’s arrangement of the spiritual ” My Soul Been Anchored in the Lord.” There were 75 thousand people at this concert and it was heard by millions on the live radio broadcast. Many people see this day as the beginning of the modern civil rights movement.
And then….the doors shut on Florence Price and the glass ceiling descended. Despite her successes she was ignored by all major arts organizations. By the mid-1940s, she knew that her efforts to promote her music were doomed to be fruitless. Undaunted, she kept composing steadily and prolifically until her death in 1953. Her music then passed into her daughter’s hands. But she too could not find anyone who would even look at her mother’s music. When Florence’s daughter died the music was presumed to be lost. And there the matter stood for 20 years. The miracle; in 2009, Price’s dilapidated and abandoned Chicago summer home was going to be destroyed and her remaining possessions were being put into garbage bags for disposal. And then someone noticed 30 boxes in the corner. And inside…. there was music…a great deal of music, including 5 symphonies, 4 concertos, chamber music and dozens of songs.
Since then, much of her output has been recorded and rapturously received by audiences and critics. The vast majority of American orchestras now include her music in their repertoire.
For this concert I have orchestrated Florence Price’s version of “My Soul Been Anchored in the Lord”. This world premiere will be sung by Jemeesa Yarborough , a brilliant, spirited, young African-American whose vocal artistry will grace this landmark event in DSO history.