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Florence Beatrice Price; Leo Sowerby: Music For String Quartet

Avalon String Quartet

Florence Beatrice Price; Leo Sowerby: Music For String Quartet
it is Sowerby’s A minor String Quartet that makes the biggest impression on this album. His language is muscular and direct...Passionate advocates, the Avalon players excel at any speed, though...

Florence Beatrice Price; Leo Sowerby: Music For String Quartet

Avalon String Quartet

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This release includes a digital booklet

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it is Sowerby’s A minor String Quartet that makes the biggest impression on this album. His language is muscular and direct...Passionate advocates, the Avalon players excel at any speed, though...

About

Florence Price and Leo Sowerby were both prominent members of the Chicago music community in the 1930s and 1940s, and they are known to have respected each other’s work. Most of Florence Price’s compositions remained unpublished at her death, and her String Quartet in A minor was not performed in her lifetime. Its African American vernacular idioms and colorful harmonic language are characteristics shared in the famous melodies woven into the later Five Folksongs in Counterpoint. From its brooding opening through propulsive rhythms, expressive lyrical melodies and fugal finale, this premiere recording of Sowerby’s String Quartet in G minor reveals a work undeserving of its decades of obscurity. This recording is very much part of an encouraging rediscovery of Florence Price, the first African American female to have a symphonic work performed in Chicago back in 1933, coupled with Leo Sowerby’s unpublished String Quartet in G minor. This is the kind of release that adds significantly to our knowledge of American classical music in the 1930s, topped off with the attraction of Price’s better-known Five Folksongs in Counterpoint from 1951.

Contents and tracklist

I. Moderato
Track length10:00
II. Andante cantabile
Track length5:50
III. Juba. Allegro
Track length4:02
IV. Finale. Allegro
Track length5:53
I. Languidly, darkly - Fast, with dash
Track length13:47
II. Very fast
Track length6:03
III. Slowly, rhapsodically
Track length5:43
IV. Broadly - Moderately fast, yet with broad sweep
Track length5:55
No. 1, Calvary. Adagio vigoroso
Track length3:54
No. 2, Clementine. Andantino
Track length2:47
No. 3, Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes. Andantino cantabile
Track length4:03
No. 4, Shortnin' Bread. Allegro
Track length1:17
No. 5, Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. Andantino
Track length5:00

Awards and reviews

May 2024

it is Sowerby’s A minor String Quartet that makes the biggest impression on this album. His language is muscular and direct...Passionate advocates, the Avalon players excel at any speed, though they can do lit tle to repair the work’s one flaw: lopsided architecture, with a meatier finale definitely required.
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