Violin Concerto No. 2

Composition and premiere: Florence Price completed her Violin Concerto No. 2 in 1952 and dedicated it to the violinist Minnie Cedargreen Jernberg. Following the composer’s unexpected death in June 1953, Chicago’s Musicians Club of Women organized a memorial concert at which the concerto was premiered in a reduction for violin and piano with Jernberg and pianist Florence Henline on November 2, 1953. The orchestral score, lost for decades, was rediscovered in 2009. The public premiere was given by Er-Gene Kahng with the Arkansas Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Steven Byess at the Arend Arts Center, Bentonville, Arkansas, on February 17, 2018. First Boston Symphony Orchestra performance: August 22, 2026, with soloist Randall Goosby and conductor Thomas Wilkins, in the Koussevitzky Music Shed at Tanglewood. 

Concertos are designed for one purpose: display the superhuman musical agility of an instrumental soloist in a pleasingly expressive container. To that end, the violin concerto has a distinguished history spanning from the restrained intensity of Mozart, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn to the grandiose showstoppers by Tchaikovsky, Brahms, and Sibelius. Across the twentieth century, certain composers kept strong ties to this expressive virtuosic tradition—Erich Korngold, for example—while others, such as Igor Stravinsky, used the genre as a vehicle for modernist stylistic innovations in line with developing trends. Florence Price’s two violin concertos date from the bookends of her mature compositional period: 1934 and 1952, respectively. Both threaded the contemporary stylistic needle in distinctive ways—the first with imaginative riffs on Tchaikovsky’s warhorse and the second with an unusual outward shape.

Price was never radical, but she knew how to develop a unique stylistic voice. We know that the second violin concerto marked an effort at rejuvenation to do just that after a period in which she’d been focusing on art songs and music published for children. In a 1953 letter to Robert Whitney, conductor of the Louisville Orchestra and a former Chicago acquaintance, she wrote that she had “recently decided to give more time to writing the kind of music which lies closest to my heart”—orchestral music. And, indeed, she had finished the concerto only a few months prior and included the score for Whitney’s perusal with the hope that it would lead to a place in his ensemble’s generous grant-funded commissioning program.

Few details about the concerto’s origin survive, but it arose partly from her membership in the Musicians Club of Women—a Chicago-based organization with roots dating to 1873 that Price integrated racially when she joined around 1950. The concerto’s dedicatee was a prominent violinist and fellow club member, Minnie Cedargreen Jernberg (1888–1967), with whom Price would almost certainly have crossed paths shortly after she migrated to Chicago from Little Rock in 1927. Though finished in May 1952, the piece premiered at a memorial concert the club held for Price roughly five months after her sudden death in June 1953; Jernberg was soloist. The rough convergence of the concerto’s completion with Price’s death marked at least two tragedies: it foreclosed a potential commission from the Louisville Orchestra as well as a trip to Europe she had planned specifically to share some of her latest works. The full score, however, was recovered at Price’s former summer cottage in 2009 and has increasingly become a worthy repertoire staple.

The two most noteworthy features of the piece are its brevity and structural compactness. Available recordings, including Randall Goosby’s with the Philadelphia Orchestra, run around fifteen to sixteen minutes. It is also self-contained in a single movement—a marked departure from the conventional three-movement structure of fast–slow–quick and light. It’s possible that both features mark the concerto as a work in progress. If she wrote it for a multi-composer club recital program with time limitations per work, expanding it in the future is not outside the realm of possibility. But without any corroborating evidence, we must accept the work as written. Indeed, Price called her 1934 piano concerto a “concerto in one movement” even though it comprises three distinct sections in the typical pattern, only played without pause. The violin concerto is truly miniature and delivers on the piano work’s promise. (It is also worth noting that Roy Harris, who briefly taught Price in 1946, composed a single-movement violin concerto in 1949, but the similarities are too superficial to infer directional influence.)

Beyond its more rigid single-movement shape, Price’s second violin concerto also departs from other strands of her earlier style. Throughout the 1930s, many of her most prominent pieces—the four symphonies, the piano concerto, several solo piano works, and certain chamber music—draw from African American folk music and dance, either with direct quotation or merely with suggestion through certain melodic and rhythmic echoes. In this and other later works, Price moved in a more abstract direction that draws attention to underlying formal structures rather than external sonic references.

The concerto’s form is described best and most simply as a “double variation,” where two main melodies or ideas are interwoven in a series of alternating presentations, mimicking the turn of a kaleidoscope dial. Following a dramatic orchestral entrance and a free, cadenza-like passage from the soloist, the first section is delicately folksy but hard to locate in a single geographic place. By this point in her career, Price had taken a keen interest in folk music from around the world, and we might read this first main theme as an effort to capture a folk spirit across cultures. The second theme, in contrast, is lush, prayerful, and emotionally reminiscent of the slow movements in Price’s earlier works.

During the first theme’s opening appearance, the violin’s ornamented melody bubbles freely with rapid figurations in the woodwinds. When the second theme emerges after a short, dramatic burst, fluttering woodwinds connect the themes with background color. A return of the opening dramatic gesture signals that the first pairing is over. The second pairing features brass more prominently, giving it a more somber character. Again punctuated by the recurrence of the opening gesture and a brief solo cadenza, the third pairing gives the two themes to the upper strings while the soloist offers commentary in counterpoint. The fourth and final pairing slices and dices elements from each melody in a further compaction that builds to emotional climax. The interplay of the two themes across the entire fifteen-minute span creates a rewarding emotional journey that ends with a shocking surprise.

Douglas W. Shadle

Douglas Shadle is Associate Professor of Musicology at the Vanderbilt University Blair School of Music. An award-winning historian of American orchestral music, he is currently co-authoring a biography of Florence Price with Samantha Ege (Oxford University). His previous books include Orchestrating the Nation: The Nineteenth-Century American Symphonic Enterprise and Antonin Dvořak’s New World Symphony, both published by Oxford University Press.