Florence Price, Jessie Montgomery, Valerie Coleman: New York Youth Symphony

In February 2023, the New York Youth Symphony became the first youth orchestra ever to win a Grammy Award for Best Orchestral Performance, for this debut recording under music director Michael Repper. The category that year also included recordings by the Berlin Philharmonic under John Williams and the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Gustavo Dudamel, established, professional ensembles the youth orchestra’s own membership, drawn from musicians roughly 12 to 22 years old, had no obvious business beating on paper. The programme itself was a deliberate choice: rather than the standard youth-orchestra warhorses, the orchestra built the disc entirely around orchestral works by three American composers, Florence Price, Valerie Coleman and Jessie Montgomery.

About the programme

Florence Price’s Ethiopia’s Shadow in America opens the disc, a three-movement symphonic poem from 1932 tracing an imagined arc from the transatlantic slave trade through to a jazz-inflected vision of Black American life in the 20th century. Price, who died in 1953, spent much of her career under-recognised even as she became, in 1933, the first Black woman to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra, when the Chicago Symphony premiered her Symphony No. 1; a substantial body of her manuscripts was only rediscovered in 2009, in a derelict house in Illinois that had once been her summer home, and her orchestral music has been undergoing a serious recorded revival in the years since. The disc also carries her Piano Concerto in One Movement, with pianist Michelle Cann as soloist, a single continuous movement blending late-Romantic piano-concerto writing with spiritual and dance-inflected themes.

Valerie Coleman, a flautist and composer perhaps best known as the founder of the wind quintet Imani Winds, contributes Umoja: Anthem of Unity in this orchestral version, the piece began life as a choral round in 1993 before Coleman later reworked it for wind quintet and, subsequently, orchestra, and it has become one of the most widely performed works by a living American composer on US orchestral programmes. Jessie Montgomery’s Soul Force, completed in 2015, closes the disc; Montgomery, a violinist and composer with roots in New York’s Lower East Side new-music and social-activist scene, takes its title from a phrase used by Martin Luther King Jr. and builds the piece from a fragmented, gradually coalescing rhythmic idea.

About the performers

The New York Youth Symphony is a pre-professional training orchestra founded in 1963, drawing its membership from young musicians across the New York area through a competitive annual audition process. Michael Repper became the orchestra’s music director in 2018; this recording, made with the orchestra and released on the UK-based Avie Records, was his first commercial disc with the ensemble. Pianist Michelle Cann, the soloist in Price’s Piano Concerto, has become one of the recording’s most prominent interpreters of Price’s piano and orchestral works more broadly, and holds the Eleanor Sokoloff Chair in Piano Studies at the Curtis Institute of Music.

A note on this page

This is a newly written review of a real, current recording rather than a page recovered from mmmusic’s original 1991–2018 archive, the shop closed before this disc existed. We’ve written it fresh from verified facts about the recording, its Grammy win and its performers, as part of extending the site’s classical coverage to what’s actually being recorded and awarded today, alongside the reviews recovered from the original site.