Page 45 - Winterreise Coverage Book, 2021 - 22

The Catalyst Quartet’s “Uncovered” series has quickly become one of the most
worthwhile recording projects around, notable not just for the serious attention that
the quartet is paying to Black composers who deserve it, but also for the excellence of
their playing. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was the focus of the first release; Florence
Price, of the second, which offers six works, four of them premiere recordings, with
the aid of the pianist Michelle Cann and the violinist Abi Fayette, who joined the
quartet after the recent departure of the composer Jessie Montgomery. (Next up are
William Grant Still, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson and George Walker.)
The two largest works here, a piano quintet and string quartet, both in A minor, date
to the mid-1930s and are in the lush, epic style — weaving distinctive spiritual idioms
into inherited forms — that has become familiar from Price’s contemporaneous First
and Third symphonies. The four other works are quite different: a two-movement,
likely unfinished String Quartet in G (1929) that has a striking slow movement
contrasting poignant lyricism with darkly comedic episodes; an undated piano
quartet, concise yet effective; and two late quartets, the “Negro Folksongs in
Counterpoint” (from around 1947) and “Five Folksongs in Counterpoint” (1951),
which concludes with a bravura setting of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” It starts off
having something of Haydn’s “Emperor” Quartet to it, but ends with an energy and
conviction all Price’s own. DAVID ALLEN