In addition to the harvest of death, disenfranchisement, pain and suffering inflicted by societies locked into institutionalised racism, there is also the incalculable loss of unrealised potential. Combine pervasive racism with centuries of undervaluing the contributions of women and the odds against success become all but overwhelming. This new Naxos release of the First and Fourth Symphonies by Florence Beatrice Price (1887-1953) is part of the rediscovery now under way of an African American woman who defied those odds.

A native of Little Rock, Arkansas, Price’s musical education began early with her piano teacher mother. At 14 she was admitted to New England Conservatory, where she studied with George Whitefield Chadwick. In 1910 she was named head of the music department at Clark Atlanta University. Even after she and her husband moved to Chicago with their two daughters in the late 1920s, Price continued to study, notably with Leo Sowerby and Roy Harris.

Price’s First Symphony was composed in 1932 for a contest sponsored by the Wanamaker Foundation and performed by the Chicago Symphony under Frederick Stock the following year. Her Fourth Symphony, composed in 1945 and recorded here for the first time, was discovered in 2009 among a sheaf of manuscripts in her former summer home on the outskirts of Chicago.

Both works exhibit a thorough familiarity with late 19th-century symphonic practice but with contemporary harmony, vibrant rhythmicality and melodic invention all their own. Presumably in all Price’s symphonies (the Second is apparently lost), a juba dance replaces the scherzo as the third movement. With the exception of an allusion to the spiritual ‘Wade in the water’ in the first movement of the Fourth Symphony, Price does not quote folk music but evokes it through characteristic melodic and rhythmic gestures. Her handling of the orchestra is idiomatic and strikingly original, with solos generously allocated throughout the ensemble. Each symphony describes a grand emotional trajectory, over the course of four movements, from deep seriousness to redemptive joy.

The introduction or, more appropriately, restoration of Price’s unique voice is unquestionably an enrichment of the American symphonic canon.