Composer: Florence Price
Performer: Karen Slack, Michelle Cann
Format: FLAC (tracks)
Label: Azica Records
Catalogue: Azica71370
Release: 2024
Size: 201 MB
Recovery: +3%
Scan: yes
01. Desire
02. Bright be the Place
03. Ships that Pass in the NIght
04. Pittance
05. The Sum
06. Who Grope with Love for Hands
07. There be None
08. Sacrament
09. What do I Care for Morning
10. The Dawn’s Awake
11. Beyond the Years
12. Youth
13. Winter Idyl
14. Little Things
15. Your Leafy Voice
16. Spring
17. I Remember
18. Interim
19. Song is So Old
Florence Price is a rare, perhaps unique, example of a composer whose output was vastly increased in size after the discovery of a cache of lost manuscripts, and this process is still going on. The 19 songs on Beyond the Years were found in collections of Price’s papers, mostly at the University of Arkansas and the University of Pennsylvania; the detailed booklet gives full bibliographic information for both music and texts. There is little here of the novel incorporation of African American musical elements that often characterizes Price’s works in larger forms, yet the songs do not feel derivative of late Romantic styles. There is an attractive sense of a personal response to the texts, which range from Lord Byron to poems by various 20th century writers, including Paul Laurence Dunbar. Price wrote one text herself and seems to have been rather adventurous in seeking out other poetry that fit her aims; she also modifies a few of the texts at will. Sample the admirably compact Desire to a text by the blind poet Orma Jean Surbey at the beginning of the program. Karen Slack is a rising soprano who has been heard in major operatic productions and here downsizes her creamy voice effectively to song dimensions; she is idiomatically recorded at a Goshen College auditorium in Indiana, and her balances with accompanist Michelle Cann are accurate and natural. This may not be absolutely top-drawer Price, but it will be of great interest to fans of the composer, for the music offers insight into the woman behind the music.