MAURICE RAVEL - Born in Ciboure, France, March 7, 1875; died in Paris, France, December 28, 1937

Sonatine, M. 40 (1903-5)

Ravel’s Sonatine, published in 1905, marked the beginning of his contract with Paris publisher Durand.  Though modest in length, it is anything but slight in invention.  It began inauspiciously.  In 1903, The Weekly Critical Review launched a competition for a 75-measure sonatina.  Ravel submitted a 77-bar movement – and became the sole entrant when the magazine abruptly folded.  Undeterred, he added two movements, inspired more by 18^th century composers than by his contemporaries.

The opening movement unfolds with characteristic clarity and logic, adhering to strict sonata form.  It immediately presents the interval of a descending fourth, which becomes a unifying motif throughout.  A graceful minuet follows, nostalgic yet fresh, before the glittering finale channels Ravel's 18^th century French keyboard ancestors and Scarlatti.  Themes recur subtly across movements, binding the work with quiet ingenuity.

JOEL THOMPSON - Born in the Bahamas in 1988

My Dungeon Shook: Three American Preludes (2020)

Joel Thompson’s My Dungeon Shook: Three American Preludes takes its title from James Baldwin’s 1962 essay My Dungeon Shook, a searing meditation on racial injustice and American ideals.  “James Baldwin is a true prophet,” Thompson said recently.  “He’s looked at America and called it for what it is and given us tools to survive.”

Now based in Atlanta, Thompson was born in the Bahamas to a Jamaican family and moved to the US at age 10.  His 2015 breakthrough work, Seven Last Words of the Unarmed, set to music the final words of Black men and boys killed by police and vigilantes.  “The foundation of my musicianship is the Black church,” he says.

Reflecting “the cognitive dissonance that arises between the ideals of this country and the reality of the country,” Thompson’s Three American Preludes echo the “devastating summer of 2020.”  Totentanz nods to Liszt and the Dies irae and features the interval G-flat to F — the initials of George Floyd.  Lacrimosa meditates on grief through a recurring ostinato and a melody recalling that of the first prelude.  L’homme agenouillé (The Kneeling Man) evokes the knee of police officer Derek Chauvin, and its music is a fractured representation of the US anthem, left incomplete – unresolved, like the questions the music raises.

FELIX MENDELSSOHN - Born in Hamburg, Germany, February 3, 1809; died in Leipzig, November 4, 1847

Fantasie in F-sharp minor, Op. 28, MWV U92 (1828-33) ("Sonate écossaise")

Felix Mendelssohn was a conservative virtuoso.  Unlike many of his peers, he avoided showy operatic paraphrases and sentimental salon pieces.  He began piano at four and could reportedly play all of Beethoven’s symphonies from memory by age eight.  In Paris, he met virtuosos like Herz and Kalkbrenner; later visits brought friendships with Chopin and Liszt.  His writing blends the elegance of Hummel, the brilliance of Weber, and the poetic finesse of his contemporaries.

These traits run through the infrequently performed Fantasie in F-sharp minor, Op. 28 – first sketched in 1828 as a three-movement ‘Scottish Sonata.’  Though that title was dropped before its 1834 publication, echoes of Scotland remain: the opening flourish conjures a Celtic harp, and the dreamlike Andante recalls what Mendelssohn later called “the Scottish fog mood.”  The three continuous movements unfold in quickening tempos.  The Andante builds to a dramatic peak before fading into a poetic coda.  A crisp, classically poised Allegro in A major follows, clearing the mist before the turbulent Presto finale — a fiery sonata-form movement whose intensity anchors the piece.

FLORENCE PRICE - Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, April 09, 1887; died in Chicago, June 3, 1953

Piano Sonata in E minor (1932)

Florence Price left more than 450 works: four symphonies, two violin concertos, a piano concerto and Rhapsody, choral and orchestral tone poems, over 100 songs, and a vast body of music for solo piano, organ, and strings.  Nearly half of her output was written for piano.  Long overlooked, her music is now more widely recorded, published, and performed on many platforms, revealing a singular voice in American music.  Biographies by Rae Linda Brown (2002) and William Farina (2024), (with two more in progress), have already added crucial insight into a composer who shunned the spotlight and rarely gave interviews.

Rooted in the European classical tradition, Price fuses formal structures with melodic and rhythmic idioms drawn from spirituals, gospel, folk, and popular music.  Her keyboard training was foundational.  In 1906, she graduated from the New England Conservatory with diplomas in piano pedagogy and organ performance – the only student in her year to earn both.  She later taught at colleges in Arkansas and Georgia, then continued to teach and perform privately for the rest of her life.

Price’s prize-winning Sonata in E minor (1932) is an expansive late-Romantic work in three thematically linked movements, rich in pianistic bravura.  The first evolves through a fundamental sonata form structure with a slow introduction, as it explores two contrasting, spiritual-like themes in a virtuoso manner.  Price squeezes sequential patterns through many key changes, adding bravura flourishes and concerto-like cadenzas to the movement’s rhapsodic piano writing.  The Andante’s lyrical, rocking theme recalls the second theme of the first movement, offering a soulful, hymn-like refrain.  The finale begins with a whirling tarantella figure in E minor, which builds to a broader, more sentimental melody – possibly rooted in the Andante.  These themes recur and transform: the tarantella returns in a crisp, dance-like variant, then yields to a more overt echo of the slow movement.  A final burst of rhythm and energy drives the work to a triumphant close.

MARGARET BONDS - Born in Chicago, March 3, 1913; died in Los Angeles, April 26, 1972

Spiritual Suite (c. 1962)

In 1930s Chicago, Florence Price found refuge from a difficult divorce, in the Bonds family home, forging a lasting friendship with the young Margaret Bonds.  Bonds, a senior at Northwestern University, had already won recognition for her song The Sea Ghost in the 1932 Rodman Wanamaker Contest, where Price took top honors for both her Piano Sonata and Symphony in E minor.  Their collaboration soon flourished.  Bonds performed in a ballet adaptation of Price’s Fantasie nègre No. 1 and assisted with orchestral parts for an historic concert by the Chicago Symphony.  On June 15, 1933, Bonds became the CSO’s first Black soloist, and Price’s Symphony the first by a Black composer performed by a major American orchestra.

Bonds studied with William Dawson, who likely encouraged her synthesis of jazz idioms and classical forms.  That fusion shaped her Spiritual Suite (1962), premièred by Joan Holley in Miami and later performed by Bonds in Harlem.  Each movement is rooted in a spiritual: Dry Bones, Peter, Go Ring Dem Bells, and Wade in the Water – transformed in Troubled Water into a radiant, jazz-tinged showpiece framed in a traditional sonata structure.

Acknowledgements

This performance is sponsored by:

Piano Series generously sponsored by Trine Sorensen and Michael Jacobson.