THE BASICS: The Buffalo Philharmonic (BPO) in concert, Leon Botstein, guest conductor, Melissa White, violin soloist, in Max Reger’s Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Beethoven, Op. 86; Florence Price’s Concerto No. 2 for Violin and Orchestra, and Mendelssohn’s MENDELSSOHN Symphony No. 5 in D major, Op. 107, “Reformation”, Friday, March 15 at 10:30 am; Saturday, March 16 at 7:30 pm, at Kleinhans Music Hall at “3 Symphony Circle” Buffalo, 14201 where Porter Avenue, Richmond Avenue, North Street and Wadsworth meet at a traffic circle. Visit www.bpo.org or call 716-885-5000
Runtime: The usual two hours with one intermission
THE CONCERT: If you missed the BPO’s Friday morning coffee concert (okay, you had to go to work, I get it) then you have a second chance for a bite at the apple (although not the donut, those are only offered on Friday mornings). But what a delicious apple you’ll taste, with lush, exquisite music by three composers who are probably not top of mind. In fact, the BPO knew this when they programmed, as JoAnn Falletta noted, three rarely performed works. The result was a small audience made up of, to paraphrase Shakespeare, “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers [as those] now a-bed shall think themselves accursed they were not here.” Well, maybe not accursed, but definitely regretful. Still, you CAN attend the repeat concert, and get to hear a fabulous musician, violinist Melissa White, this Saturday at 7:30 at Kleinhans Music Hall.
All three composers on the bill – Max Reger, Florence Price, and Felix Mendelssohn – died relatively young at the peak of their creativity, at the ages of 43, 66, and 38 respectively. But each composer has some other unique reason for not being in the “Top Ten” among most people and, in a recent poll of WNED Classical listeners, Mendelssohn did make the Top 20, but only coming in at number 20.
In Reger’s case, it was probably anti-modernism. In Florence Price’s case, it was racism and sexism, coupled with the fact that hundreds of her compositions (including the violin concerto on this concert series) were only recently discovered by accident in 2009 when renovators opened up an abandoned house Price once owned. And in Mendelssohn’s case it was probably the disparagement by composer Wagner, whose politics we loathe but whose music we love. It’s complicated.
Now, the concert got off to a rocky start when guest conductor Leon Botstein led the orchestra in the lush, romantic “Variations and Fuge on a Theme of Beethoven,” an early 20th-century composition by the German Max Reger. There were some uncharacteristically wonky entrances by the winds and brass and the whole orchestra seemed a little uneasy. But Reger, like Franz Schreker, another name most people don’t know, gives you some beautiful music. And that’s the connecting thread of the concert… the beauty of the music.
After intermission, with the more familiar Mendelssohn, albeit playing the not-often-performed “Reformation Symphony” with powerful brass sections that will shake you, the orchestra seemed to settle in better with Mr. Botstein.
But without a doubt, the concert’s high point was the Violin Concerto No. 2, composed by mixed-race female American composer Florence Price and performed by the dynamic black female violinist Melissa White. Normally, race and gender shouldn’t matter, and mentioning them would have no place in a review, but here, they are important. Where to begin?
Let’s start with the music itself, Florence Price’s Violin Concerto No. 2, a work that could have been lost forever with hundreds of others. It’s quite a story. Price completed it in 1952, the year before her sudden death at age 66. It was never published, and after Price’s daughter died in 1975, it was thought to be lost forever. Then, in 2009, when renovators opened up an abandoned house that Price once owned near Chicago, both her violin concertos and a trove of other music, were discovered. What makes her music so special?
She was formally trained at the prestigious New England Conservatory. She could have been just another competent composer, but fortunately, her mentor, the great American composer George Whitefield Chadwick, encouraged her to be more idiomatic and incorporate elements from her roots, in this case African-American spirituals. As a result, her music has a distinctly Southern sound. As I listened, I could imagine the violin concerto being the soundtrack of a sweeping 1940s movie set in the country. To illustrate, here’s a short YouTube recording of her “Dances in the Canebrakes.”
It’s easy to hear a connection between her music and Antonin Dvořák’s “New World Symphony” (Symphony No. 9) which also celebrated American idioms. As Dvořák, who had recently arrived in America, told the New York Herald in the early 1890s: “The future music of this country must be founded upon what are called the Negro melodies. This must be the real foundation of any serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States.”
Well, well, well. Enter Florence Price. But success didn’t come easily. As she wrote herself, “I have two handicaps—those of sex and race.” Women composers were a rarity, and black women composers were extremely rare.
So let’s thank Price for persevering and Chadwick and Dvořák for their ideas, but let’s really thank the I.D.E.A. initiative of the Buffalo Philharmonic’s Diversity Council, which promotes the principles of inclusion, diversity, equity, and access and aims “to break down barriers to participation, especially for those who are underrepresented in the artform.” One way that the BPO does that is by partnering with The Sphinx Organization, a non-profit organization based in Detroit, Michigan dedicated to developing young Black and Latino classical musicians. Annually, the BPO invites a Sphinx star to perform.
And that brings us to internationally acclaimed violinist and Sphinx Competition laureate Melissa White. (Good news: She was recently appointed Professor of Music at UB so she’ll be around for more concerts!) As she came on stage, you could tell that the orchestra had already adopted White as one of their own, waving their violin bows in admiration. And then the music started, and her rich, almost viola-like tone blended perfectly with the orchestra.
The concerto is different from the usual three-movement (fast-slow-fast) classical form. There are no movements per se, but there are different sections, and, as I imagined my own movie in my mind, we open on a languid day, perhaps in the canebrakes, hot and humid, with slow dreamy music. Then trouble, danger, or perhaps a Canebrake Rattlesnake appears, and the music becomes quite agitated. Then the snake slithers away, and calm is restored, only to reappear.
There is a recording of the Violin Concerto No. 2, starring another Sphinx prize-winning laureate, who has also been in Buffalo to perform with the BPO, and that’s Randall Goosby. (I remember when he was very young his mother brought him to the WNED Classical radio studios. Nice kid.) He’s all grown up now and you can listen to a YouTube video of his playing the Price Violin Concerto No. 2 with The Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin here
Today’s soloist, violinist Melissa White, has been in Buffalo before, performing at Slee Hall at a UB Department of Music concert back in April 2022. A native of Michigan, she holds performance degrees from the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music and New England Conservatory (just like Florence Price!), where her teachers included a Buffalo favorite, co-founder of the Cleveland Quartet, Donald Weilerstein. I was curious about her violin and read somewhere that her current instrument, “Matilda,” was commissioned as part of a Sphinx “MPower” Artist Grant in 2014 by the American violin maker Ryan Soltis. I love that it has a name (fun fact: Yo-Yo Ma’s cello is named “Petunia.”)
So, by all means, go hear Melissa play Matilda as we welcome Ms. White to, we hope, many years here in Buffalo!
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