concert review: Oakland Symphony

So I decided to attend that concert, the one where the Black conductor with Black soprano soloist would perform the music of five Black composers. I went because it promised an interesting program, but most especially because one of the composers was Florence Price, the mid-20C American woman whom I've been going around calling things like "criminally forgotten." But not by Oakland conductor Michael Morgan, who remembers a lot of unjustly neglected things.

Price's Symphony No. 3 is a charming and characteristic work in a generally Americana style often reminiscent of Henry Cowell's, but with hints, suggestions, and leanings of African American folk music all over it, in melodic shape, rhythms, and harmonies. It was brightly and firmly played here; the only flaw was that the amplified celesta was far too loud.

It was followed by Duke Ellington's Harlem, which is essentially "jazz for symphony orchestra." This kind of undercut Price, since Ellington is doing openly what Price prefers only to suggest, and didn't strike my own appreciation as much, though I enjoyed the cadenza for five percussionists.

Soprano Shawnette Sulker, whom I've heard before locally in Beethoven's Ninth, Mahler's Eighth, and Carmina Burana, performed in Songs of Separation, a song cycle by William Grant Still setting poems of lost love by Black poets. Still was the leading Black male composer of the same Americana generation as Price. Sulker sang well, but I didn't find the work as distinctive as his symphonies.

There were also works by two earlier, non-American composers who, though they were Black, wrote in typical styles of white composers of their time and place. One, the only composer on the program I had been unfamiliar with, was Antonio Carlos Gomes, a Brazilian who, despite his nationality, wrote Italian opera. Sulker sang a long aria from his opera Il Guarany, which at least has a Brazilian plot. It's fairly plain and songlike in its style; the light orchestration might have fit bel canto more than the Verdi it's contemporary with.

And a Symphony in G by the classic-era Frenchman, Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges. His mother was a slave from a West Indies French colony, but he inherited his white father's title and social position. He was an important musician in his time, for one thing being the guy who commissioned and performed Haydn's set known as the Paris Symphonies. His own symphony is more Mozartean than Haydnesque, but with an individual flavor that's not matched by all of the symphonists of that era who get played on the classical radio more often than he.

Was able to get to Oakland in time despite a delay in leaving home caused by wrestling on the phone to get our cable tv service fixed, with - for a wonder - a cooperative and helpful technician. Even got there (by BART) in time to have dinner at the Chinese restaurant a block away that has kung pao fish, a dish almost as rarely offered as music by Black composers.