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CSO Chamber Music: African American Composers of the 20th Century & Beyond
CSO Chamber Music: African American Composers of the 20th Century & Beyond
Sunday, February 23rd, 2025
2:00pm
Tickets Non-members $40, Members $36, SoFA Students – $20
Chicago Symphony Orchestra Chamber Music will perform the works of three distinguished African American composers of the 20th century & beyond: Jessie Montgomery, Wynton Marsalis, and Florence Beatrice Price.
CSO violinists Matous Michal and Danny Yehun, violist Danny Lai, and cellist Karen Basrak will perform Montgomery’s Strum for String Quartet, Florence Beatrice Price’s String Quartet No. 2 in A Minor and Wynton Marsalis’ string quartet piece, At The Octoroon Balls.
Jessie Montgomery has been described by the Chicago Tribune as “a voice as refreshing as it is, inexplicably, recognizable”. Her piece, Strum, salutes “American folk idioms and the spirit of dance and movement,” offering a vibrant, modern perspective to the program.
Wynton Marsalis, renowned for his decades-long mastery of jazz compositions and performances, will have work performed of his New Orleans inspired piece, At the Octoroon Balls. This work, hailed by BBC Music Magazine as an “extremely impressive debut” with music that has a “thrilling urgency and power,” blends jazz and classical elements in Marsalis’ signature style.
The program also honors Florence Beatrice Price, a composer who lived much of her life in the south side of Chicago, with a performance of her String Quartet No. 2 in A minor, completed in 1935 but only published in 2019, and never performed during her lifetime. With “a theme whose evocative blue thirds directly bespeak Price’s African American heritage”, it is a piece “of remarkable emotional breadth”. Price rose to prominence in 1933 with her Symphony No. 1, which debuted with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The Chicago Daily News praised the work as “faultless… worthy of a place in the regular symphonic repertoire,” and marking the first time a major orchestra performed music by an African American woman.
Don’t miss the opportunity to experience the works of these influential African American composers of the 20th Century & beyond, and honor their enduring legacies.
