Sun 2/28 @ 3PM
The next concert in Heights Arts’ Close Encounters series features a work by a composer everyone knows and one by a composer that few know. Mozart, of course, needs no introduction to anyone. But Florence Price, who lived and worked in the first half of the 20th century, is largely unknown.
A skilled composer of symphonies, concertos and other orchestra works, chamber pieces and choral works, and solo compositions, primary for piano, her main instrument, she had the double whammy of being a woman and being African-American. She passed as Mexican to attend the New England Conservatory of Music, where she graduated with honors.
After living in her native south during early adulthood, she spent the rest of her life — and pinnacle of her career — in Chicago as part of the Great Migration. There she studied composition, connected with other musicians and artists as Chicago was undergoing a flourishing of Black arts similar to the Harlem Renaissance. In 1933, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed one of her works, the first time a major symphony programmed a work by an African-American woman composer. She often incorporated influences from the blues and Black spirituals.
A small ensemble of musicians — violinists Mari Sato and Isabel Trautwein, violist Eric Wong, cellist Tanya Ell-Woolfrey and clarinetist Robert Woolfrey — will play Price’s String Quartet No. 2, along with Mozart’s Quintet in A Major.
Tickets are $25, $20 for Heights Arts members, $10 for students. Once you purchase your ticket, you’ll get the link to watch the concert online.
Cleveland Heights, OH 44118