Finishing APA's 'Grand Encounters,' Michelle Cann spreads acquaintance with solo-piano repertoire

Chances are that the name "Florence Price" has dropped firmly into the consciousness of music-lovers

Michelle Cann applies her artistry as a Florence Price advocate.

where not long ago the name meant nothing, and her music was seldom heard. Michelle Cann, having finished her education at the Cleveland Institute of Music with two piano-performance degrees just over a decade ago, in 2016 discovered the work of Price (1887-1953) and has made advocacy a major part of her subsequent career.

She spread the word further under the auspices of the American Pianists Association Sunday afternoon at Indiana Landmarks Center to conclude the organization's "Grand Encounter" series for 2021-22. Price was represented in the program's centerpiece by her Piano Sonata in E minor. 

In three movements, the conventional structure and the mood-painting suggested by the Scherzo: Allegro finale were steeped in African-American music. The difference between such a piece and Price's "Fantaisie negre" No. 1 in E minor and Margaret Bonds' "Troubled Water," which ended the program, is the variation treatment of a folk tune that amounts to attractive salon music. All three were idiomatically performed Sunday afternoon. Cann responded to the vociferous ovation with a surprising encore, jazz pianist Hazel Scott's take on Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C-sharp minor. The work, a blend of tribute and mockery, along with the way the APA guest performed it, raised the audience's captivation to an intense level.

As for the Price sonata, it cleverly develops its themes, which are original and suggestive of the authentic genre native to these shores that Antonin Dvorak famously recommended to American composers. The first and second melodies of the opening movement complement each other; the "black spiritual" style of the Andante, with its left-hand gravitas, made affecting work of a great tune's return to climax the movement in Cann's hands. In the finale, as Cann told the audience, characteristics of the "juba" dance from West Africa were exploited in rondo form with fresh exuberance.

Price's struggles for respectability as a creative artist have borne fruit posthumously. True, she had moments of eminence that she had to work hard for, particularly in Chicago, where she settled after leaving her hometown of Little Rock and a sojourn in Atlanta. But she had many disappointments, both personal and professional. Her fascinating life, sketched in Cann's remarks from the stage, gets lots of sympathetic detail in a video lecture accessible through the Classical Nerd channel.

Maybe a little less talk from the stage, as illuminating as it was about Cann's devotion to her program, would have allowed room for the fourth of Clara Schumann's "Quatre Pieces Fugitives," op. 15. The work by another woman whose gender, though not race, surely hemmed in her achievements, isn't known to me. But I'm guessing that the fourth miniature, a Scherzo, would have capped the set better than the third one, Andante espressivo.  Of the three that Cann performed, No. 2 in A minor was especially effective, sounding like Clara's husband Robert, who predeceased her by many years. It was so redolent of Robert Schumann that it suggested some of his pieces may bear more of her influence than we'll ever know, rather than the other way around.

Cann opened her recital with two works from the tradition familiar to all advanced students of classical piano. Price respected such composers as Chopin and Brahms to a worshipful degree during her career as composer and performer. As Cann indicated in her oral program notes, the ballade, a musical representation of  a narrative poetic form well-known in the 19th century, suggested  different kinds of narrative to Chopin and to Brahms. Both approaches inspired Price as she drew upon African-American stories, using classical procedures of a romantic cast.

Cann's performance of Chopin's Ballade No. 3 in A major was a kind of deep-tissue massage that amounted to an overstrong imposition of personality upon the work. To me, hers was nearly an extra-musical response to the score, so ruminative in the main section that the rhythmic profile shriveled under pushes and tugs of the tempo. A significant key change introduces a more activist response to a piece that coheres a lot more rationally than the recitalist's interpretation suggested. Cann's love of mystery and nuance was more to the point in the way she played Brahms's Ballade no. 2 in G major from op. 10. Both interpretations at least were fitting representations of the recitalist's artistic mission, which creditably links neglected black female composers with the European mainstream and expands the breadth of the piano repertoire.