PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION
International Piano Competition. The youngest contestant, at 19 years old, she also took home the awards for Best Performance of Chamber Music and of a New Work. A Steinway artist, in 2010 she received an Avery Fisher Career Grant.
Yang has performed with the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic and BBC Philharmonic, among many others, working with such distinguished conductors as James Conlon, Edo de Waart, Manfred Honeck, Lorin Maazel, Leonard Slatkin and Jaap van Zweden. She has appeared in recital at New York’ s Lincoln Center and Metropolitan Museum, Washington’ s Kennedy Center, Chicago’ s Symphony Hall and Zurich’ s Tonhalle.
In the 2017 – 2018 season, Yang embarks on a series of debuts, collaborations and premieres. Highlights include her debut with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra under Edo de Waart performing Rachmaninoff’ s Piano Concerto No. 3 in five New Zealand cities; a performance with the Albany Symphony at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D. C., featuring works by Michael Torke( Three Manhattan Bridges, written expressly for Yang and commissioned by the Albany Symphony) and Joan Tower( Still / Rapids); a reunion with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra for three performances of Prokofiev’ s Piano Concerto No. 3; and her first collaboration with Aspen Santa Fe Ballet on a new work for dancers and solo piano choreographed by Jorma Elo, which will receive its world premiere in Aspen this March. Yang also performs alongside the Nashville, Eugene and Santa Rosa symphonies; the Lexington and Oklahoma City philharmonics; the Rochester and Reno philharmonic orchestras; and the Milwaukee, Allentown, Vancouver and Asheville symphony orchestras. She continues her enduring partnership with longtime collaborator, the Alexander String Quartet, with performances of works by Schumann and Brahms in California and New York.
Born in Seoul, South Korea in 1986, Yang received her first piano lesson from her aunt at age four. In 1997, she moved to the United States to study in the pre-college division of The Juilliard School. After winning the Philadelphia Orchestra’ s Greenfield Student Competition, she performed Prokofiev’ s Third Piano Concerto with that orchestra at just 12 years old. Yang appears in the film In the Heart of Music, a documentary about the 2005 Cliburn Competition.
Joyce Yang last appeared with the BSO in July 2002, performing Prokofiev’ s Piano Concerto No. 3, Mario Venzago, conductor.
About the Concert
DANCES IN THE CANEBRAKES
Florence Price( orch. William Grant Still)
Born in Little Rock, AR, April 9, 1887; died in Chicago, IL, June 3, 1953
As both a woman and an African American, Florence Price was a dual pioneer in the world of American classical music at a time when there were formidable obstacles in place. Born and raised in Little Rock, AR, she began playing the piano at four and had her first composition published at 11. By the time she was 14, Price had already graduated at the top of her high school class and matriculated at Boston’ s New England Conservatory. In 1906, before she was 20, she had graduated with honors; nevertheless, during part of her time there, she pretended to be Mexican in order to counter the prejudice against her race.
In 1910, Price moved to Atlanta, where she became head of the music department at Clark Atlanta University. Upon her marriage, she moved back to Little Rock, but after a series of racial incidents there she and her lawyer husband left for Chicago. There, she became friends with both the writer Langston Hughes and the great African-American contralto Marian Anderson, both of whom had a hand in promoting her composing career. After her Symphony in E Minor won first prize in the Wanamaker Foundation Awards in 1932, it was selected for performance in June 1933 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra: the first composition by an African-American woman ever to be played by a major American orchestra.
Price wrote Dances in the Canebrakes as three short piano pieces in 1953, the last year of her life. They might have been forgotten, but fortunately the famed African-American composer William Grant Still noticed them and gave them wider attention with his colorful arrangement for full orchestra enhanced by percussion and harp. Still had grown up with Price in Little Rock at the turn of the 20 th century.
Dances in the Canebrakes contains three movements:“ Nimble Feet,”“ Tropical Noon” and“ Silk Hat and Walking Cane.” Despite her European-oriented classical training, Price typically incorporated quotations or echoes of traditional African-American melodies and dance rhythms in her music. Redolent of African- American rural life in the Deep South, these charming pieces show the influence of classical ragtime in their intricate syncopated patterns.
Instrumentation: Two flutes including piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets including bass clarinet, two bassoons, alto saxophone, three horns, three trumpets, two trombones, timpani, percussion, harp and strings.
PIANO CONCERTO NO. 3 IN C MAJOR
Sergei Prokofiev
Born in Sontsovka, Ukraine, April 23, 1891; died in Moscow, U. S. S. R. March 5, 1953
When Sergei Prokofiev fled the Russian Revolution to San Francisco in 1918, he had high hopes that America would be the land of opportunity. American audiences and critics were initially fascinated by this bold young pianist / composer, whom they saw as embodying the proletarian spirit of the new Soviet Union— never mind that he was in reality a refugee. The New York Times gushed:“ His fingers are steel, his wrists steel, his biceps and triceps steel.… He is a tonal steel trust.
32 OVERTURE / BSOmusic. org