KSO features Black composers in season opener

DeKALB – The Kishwaukee Symphony Orchestra will open its 46th concert season on Saturday, Oct. 15, with “The Price is Right: Celebrating Life of Florence Price,” led by Linc Smelser, KSO music director and conductor.

The concert will be held at 7:30 p.m. in the Boutell Memorial Concert Hall in the Music Building of Northern Illinois University, DeKalb. The concert will feature works by Black composers Florence Price and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.

Those attending the concert are invited to join Smelser for a free pre-concert talk to learn more about the composers and themes presented in their music, at 6:30 p.m. in a room near the Concert Hall.

The program will feature Ballade in A Minor, Op. 33, by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor; Piano Concerto in One Movement, by Florence Price with soloist Sung Hoon Mo on piano; and Symphony No. 3 in C Minor, by Florence Price.

Mo studied at the Peabody Conservatory of Music, the Jacob School of Music at Indiana University, and the Eastman School of Music. He is on the faculty of the Music Institute of Chicago and is also a guest lecturer at the Wheaton College Conservatory of Music.

Price was the first Black woman to have her music performed by a major symphony orchestra. In 1933, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra gave the world premiere of Symphony No. 1 by a then little-known composer.

Her work faded into obscurity after her death in 1953. Much of it was thought to be lost, until a cache of music was found in her former summer house in Chicago in 2009.

Coleridge-Taylor, a composer who influenced Price, was an English composer, conductor and political activist who fought against racial prejudice with his incredible compositions.

Born in Holborn, a district in central London, in 1875 to an English mother and a father originally from Sierra Leone, he liked to be identified as Anglo-African – and was later referred to by white New York musicians as “Black Mahler,” owing to his musical success.

Tickets are sold online anytime and in the Boutell Memorial Concert Hall lobby starting 30 minutes before the concert. All seats are general admission (no reserved seating); it is recommended to arrive early. Individual ticket prices are $18 for adults, $15 for seniors 62 and older and $7 for students and children.

For information, visit kishorchestra.org.