Fantasie Negre

PRODUCT DESCRIPTION
Musicologist and pianist Samantha Ege launches an album of piano music by the trailblazing yet overshadowed African-American composer Florence Price on International Women’s Day. Her album includes the first full recording of all four of Price’s virtuosic Fantasie Nègre showpieces, following her rediscovery of Price’s Fantasie Nègre No. 3. Florence Price (1887-1953) is best known for her Symphony No. 1 in E minor, performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1933, the first African-American woman to have her music presented by a major American orchestra. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas and taught by her mother, Price graduated from the New England Conservatory aged 19, with two degrees in piano teaching and organ performance. While there, she presented herself as Mexican as her black racial identity could preclude her success. Race riots and routine lynchings forced Price and her family to move to Chicago’s South Side after her studies, where she found a vibrant community of African American musicians, composers, critics, and sponsors; Michelle Obama was later raised in the same area. Her first symphony premiered to rave reviews following the intervention of the African American community leader Maude Roberts George, after taking first place at the Rodman Wanamaker Music Awards. Price, George, and a number of other women including Margaret Bonds and Nora Holt belonged to what would later be recognised as the Black Chicago Renaissance. Price’s 300 compositions are characterised by their blend of European Romantic idioms and those drawn from African American traditional music, which she began to explore while studying in Boston under George Whitefield Chadwick, following a comfortable childhood steeped in the classical canon. As an accomplished keyboard player, her solo piano music exemplifies her command of the instrument as well as providing a snapshot of her unique compositional language. Included on the album are Price’s four highly romantic and expressive Fantasie Nègre showpieces, including the first recording of Price’s Fantasie Nègre No. 3, recently discovered by Samantha Ege while undertaking research in Arkansas. Here, Ege performs the full set of virtuosic Fantasies – envisaged as a series, like Brahms’s Fantasies, and as an expression of cultural heritage like Albéniz’s Iberia suite – on disc for the first time, and in their original versions. The Fantasie Nègres are set to disc alongside three untitled sketches by Price, light salonstyle pieces that contrast her substantial Fantasies, and three impressionistic Snapshots. Price’s music was sung by the ground-breaking African American contralto Marian Anderson to an audience of over 75,000 on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday, 1939, following the intervention of Eleanor Roosevelt (as Marian Anderson was unable to perform in Washington D.C.’s Constitution Hall due to segregation). Sadly, Price faced continued barriers due to her race and gender, working as a composer and teacher until her death in Chicago in 1953. Much of her work came perilously close to being lost following her death, with a collection of her manuscripts rediscovered in a dilapidated house in St. Anne, Illinois in 2009; it remains seriously underrepresented on disc.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Dr. Samantha Ege is the Lord Crewe Junior Research Fellow in Music at Lincoln College, University of Oxford. She holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of York and a B.A. with honours in Music from the University of Bristol. She spent her second undergraduate year at McGill University as an exchange student. She taught music internationally for several years after graduating from Bristol. Her last appointment was at the United World College of South East Asia, Singapore. She joined Lincoln College in 2020. Dr. Ege is a leading interpreter and scholar of the African American composer Florence B. Price. Dr. Ege's performances and publications shed an important light on composers from underrepresented backgrounds. She has brought her research and repertoire to the Chicago Symphony Center, Berklee College of Music, Esplanade (Singapore), University of Texas at Austin, University of Arkansas, University of York, Monash University, and the Women Composers Festival of Hartford. Dr. Ege released her debut album in May 2018 with Wave Theory Records, called Four Women: Music for solo piano by Florence Price, Vítězslava Kaprálová, Ethel Bilsland and Margaret Bonds. The album featured the world premiere recording of Bilsland’s The Birthday Party, which led to Dr. Ege preparing an edition of the suite, now published byFaber Music. Her next release with Lorelt (Lontano Records Ltd.) focuses on Price’s repertoire.

Number of Discs: 1

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