Bruch: Violin Concerto No. 1; Florence Price: Violin Concertos

Randall Goosby is classical music’s future. The eloquent violinist is also a torchbearer for the artform’s past, aware of its traditions without being ruled by them. His charismatic artistry and heartfelt lyricism are ideally matched to the choice of repertoire for his second album, a revelatory coupling of Max Bruch’s evergreen Violin Concerto No. 1 with the two violin concertos by Florence Price. The latter, completed respectively in 1939 and the year before the African American composer’s death in 1953, vanished from view until their rediscovery in 2009 in a pile of long-neglected manuscripts. Goosby appends both Price concertos with an arrangement for violin and orchestra of her tender Adoration. “It’s a bit of a mission for me to try to broaden the outlook and scope of classical music,” he tells Apple Music Classical. “I was always inspired by music like Bruch’s Violin Concerto, Beethoven’s great string quartets and all these wonderful things. But I think putting such pieces side by side with music from another background creates a different listening experience. That was the idea behind pairing the Price concertos with the Bruch.” The violinist identifies a “through line” connecting Roots, his 2021 debut album, to his recording of Bruch and Price. The slow movement of Bruch’s Violin Concerto, he notes, shares common expressive ground with that of Price’s First Violin Concerto and of her Fantasie No. 2, one of the standout pieces from Roots. Both composers used chromatic harmonies to evoke strong emotions and heighten tension in their work. “People want to feel something when they listen to music. Bruch and Price understood that and gave listeners and performers plenty to feel in their violin concertos.” Goosby’s passionate advocacy of all three concertos is backed to the hilt by the Philadelphia Orchestra and its chief conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, whose earlier recording of Price’s First and Third Symphonies helped secure new admirers for her work. “It was clear to me just how seriously they take this music, how excited they are about it and how much they’ve had time to sit and be with it,” he recalls. “They’re familiar with her musical language in a way that allowed us to really put our own stamp on it.” Anyone eager to detect the strands of musical influence that Florence Price picked up from white European men, Dvořák and Tchaikovsky among them, will not be disappointed. Yet her music speaks above all with her own unique language. “I think those echoes of various late-Romantic composers are a mark of her respect, her admiration, for their work,” concludes Goosby. “But she really has such a distinctive artistic voice. There’s such a soulfulness to her music. You don’t find that everywhere. And her late-Romantic, fast-moving, very complex harmonies and acrobatics for the violin really amplify the lyrical passages in both concertos. I don’t know if that’s what she was going for, but I think it creates a really jarring effect in the best way for both the players and the audience.”