But Not My Soul: Price, Dvořák & Giddens

Featuring superb, electric performances captured in terrific close detail, this album is an important step in our continued rediscovery of Florence Price’s music. Although Price wasn’t entirely ignored in her time, she nevertheless wasn’t given the prominence she deserved—works such as the 1935 String Quartet No. 2 show a composer of great imagination and fine technical and dramatic skills. There’s so much atmosphere in Price’s Quartet, which celebrates and blends spirituals, African dances and European traditions. It helps, of course, that the piece is brilliantly showcased by the Ragazze Quartet, who nurture its every detail, and relish its rhythmic and harmonic colours. Price follows in the blazed trail of Czech composer Antonín Dvořák who, some 40 years earlier, was creating a similar fusion of traditions in his “American” String Quartet No. 12, a work full of ebullient energy and folk-song innocence. Once again, the Ragazze’s tight ensemble work packs plenty of warmth, humour and grace. An arrangement of Rhiannon Giddens’ song “At the Purchaser’s Option” acts as a powerful coda, while its lyrics provide the haunting title of this rewarding programme.