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Yannick Nezet-Seguin leads Philadelphia Orchestra in 'Price & Dawson Symphonies' / WFMT: Featured New Release

The Philadelphia Orchestra and its Music and Artistic Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin continue their pioneering project to revive neglected music by Black American composers. Their latest recording released by Deutsche Grammophon, captures Florence Price’s Symphony No. 4 and William Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony. Listeners have the chance to sample movements from both works ahead of the album’s full release, with the “Juba” from Price’s Fourth Symphony and “O, Le’ Me Shine, Shine Like a Morning Star!” from the Negro Folk Symphony  also out now.

Born in Alabama in 1899, William Levi Dawson studied at the renowned Tuskegee Institute (he later founded its School of Music, serving as its director for 25 years), Kansas City’s Horner Institute and Chicago’s American Conservatory. His Negro Folk Symphony was premiered in 1934 by The Philadelphia Orchestra and Leopold Stokowski. Despite its overwhelmingly enthusiastic reception, it then suffered the fate of other works by Black composers, enduring decades of almost total neglect.

As part of his desire both to honour The Philadelphia Orchestra’s rich tradition of championing contemporary composers and shine new light on unjustly forgotten masterpieces, Nézet-Séguin programmed what he calls the “mind-blowingly well orchestrated” Negro Folk Symphony for only the third time in the orchestra’s history earlier this year, using a new edition of Dawson’s score. The performance at Verizon Hall, hailed by The Philadelphia Inquirer as “a knockout” and “momentous”, was recorded live by Deutsche Grammophon.

A lament for the millions of Africans shipped across the Atlantic into slavery, the symphony is built on original spirituals and themes written in the style of spirituals, each of its three movements boasting a programmatic title: “The Bond of Africa”, “Hope in the Night” and “O, Le’ Me Shine, Shine Like a Morning Star!”. Dawson reworked his score in 1952 (this recording is based on the revised version) to include some of the complex rhythms he had heard during a recent visit to West Africa, reinforcing the emotional impact of a work that combines the spiritual tradition with a symphonic language redolent of that of composers such as Dvorák and Brahms.

“It is an attempt to develop Negro music, something they said again and again could not be developed,” Dawson said of his symphony in 1934. “I have never doubted the possibilities of our music, for I feel that buried in the South is music that somebody, some day, will discover. They will make another great music out of the folksongs of the South. I feel from the bottom of my heart that it will rank one day with the music of Brahms and the Russian composers.”

Dawson’s close contemporary Florence Price, whose Symphony No. 1 (1931-32) was the first by a woman of colour to be played by a major American orchestra, composed her Fourth Symphony in 1945. It remained unperformed during her lifetime, in part because of the racist and misogynistic attitudes that blighted Price’s career, and vanished until its chance rediscovery in 2009 in a dusty pile of manuscripts.

Maestro Nézet-Séguin and his “Fabulous Philadelphians” received their first Grammy Award in 2022 for their DG recording of Florence Price’s Symphonies Nos. 1 & 3. The partnership recorded her Fourth Symphony at the same time – October 2021, during lockdown and therefore behind closed doors and in studio conditions.

Like Dawson in his Negro Folk Symphony, Price achieves a striking synthesis of the folk music of Black America and European symphonic idioms in her Fourth. Its stirring opening movement develops around a theme taken from the spiritual “Wade in the Water”, and is followed by a more melancholy Andante cantabile second movement. The third, “Juba”, pays homage to the lively, syncopated African American dance of the same name, before the concise finale brings the work to an exuberant, emphatic conclusion.


For September 25, 2023, Yannick Nézet-Séguin leads the Philadelphia Orchestra in Price: Symphony No. 4, Dawson: Negro Folk Symphony is the WFMT: Chicago 'Featured New Release,' WFMT writes….The Philadelphia Orchestra and its Music and Artistic Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin continue their project to revive neglected music by Black American composers. Their latest recording captures Florence Price’s Symphony No. 4 and William Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony. As part of his desire both to honor the orchestra’s rich tradition of championing contemporary composers and shine new light on unjustly forgotten masterpieces, Nézet-Séguin programmed what he calls the “mind-blowingly well orchestrated” Negro Folk Symphony for only the third time in the orchestra’s history. Dawson’s close contemporary Florence Price, whose Symphony No. 1 was the first by a woman of color to be played by a major American orchestra, composed her Fourth Symphony in 1945. It remained unperformed during her lifetime and vanished until its chance rediscovery in 2009 in a dusty pile of manuscripts.