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Florence Beatrice Price; Leo Sowerby: Music For String Quartet
Avalon 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
Purchase product
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 Most of Florence Price’s compositions remained unpublished at her death, and her String Quartet in A minor was not performed in her lifetime.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first African American female to have a symphonic work performed in Chicago back in 1933, coupled with Leo Sowerby’s unpublished String Quartet in G minor.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
- Avalon String Quartet
- Avalon String Quartet
- Avalon String Quartet
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.