European premiere for Florence Price song-cycle anchors US composers programme
The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra marked the anniversary of American Independence with the European premiere of a newly orchestrated Florence Price work.
Conductor Kazuki Yamada led the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra on Friday in a programme built around American repertoire, headlined by the European premiere of Florence Price’s 1941 song-cycle, The Heart of a Woman.
The concert tapped into the "Freedom 250" marketing campaign surrounding the anniversary of American Independence. For European orchestras, this anniversary has provided a commercially viable formula: programming established names like George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, and John Adams to reliably fill concert halls. Friday's generously filled audience suggested the strategy continues to work.
Yamada structured the evening as two facing musical panels. The first sequence paired Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man with his Lincoln Portrait. Soprano Janai Brugger delivered the president’s words with poised emphasis against a backdrop of strings and woodwinds.
The parallel sequence prefaced the Price premiere with Joan Tower’s 1987 piece, Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman. The Tower work is louder than Copland's fanfare and operates as an unapologetic feminist statement. Thematically, it served as a direct curtain-raiser for Price.
Price’s cycle, newly orchestrated by Lior Rosner, features texts by Langston Hughes and sits on the cusp of music theatre. It frequently tips into Broadway stylings, particularly in the flirtatious "Don’t you tell me no" and the rhapsodic "My dream". Brugger’s rich vocal performance ultimately carried the material, though the added orchestral scale placed pressure on the miniatures that their slight substance could not entirely support.
The advertised centrepiece was John Adams’ 1980 piece Harmonium, a large-scale work functioning as a concerto for choir and orchestra. The composition manipulates time, freezing it for the Emily Dickinson text "Because I could not stop for Death" and accelerating wildly for Walt Whitman’s "Wild Nights". While Yamada’s incisive energy suited the score, the CBSO Chorus sounded timid and slightly behind the beat, a dynamic they must resolve before taking the piece to the Proms later this month.
