A TETRALOGY OF GOOD NEWS, COURTESY OF FLORENCE PRICE, MARGARET BONDS, AND FRIENDS (1)

The image of Florence Price shown here is a photograph taken in the early 1950s, around the same time as the composition of Adoration.

Several of my posts in this blog this year have been negative – complaints, criticisms, that sort of thing. I’m sorry about that. I’m happier about the series of posts that I shared about the triumphant semi-staged premiere of Margaret Bonds’s musical Bitter Laurel at Queens University of Charlotte on April 18-19 – about which more soon! – but beset as we are by bad news, it’s especially important that I use this blog to try to bring something uplifting and constructive to anyone who reads it.

Hence this post – which starts out negatively enough but then turns that around with a piece of good news that, providentially, is just the first of a set of four major good tidings I have to share here. All center on the two composers whose lives and legacies have been the raisons d’être of this blog since its inception more than six years ago: Florence Price and Margaret Bonds.

So here goes:

The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin launched the year 2026 in a most inauspicious fashion – performing a work titled “Rainbow Waltz” that they fraudulently identified as having been composed by Florence Price. The forgery was met with an outcry – virtuosa blogger, oboist, and composer Katherine Needleman led the charge – and this was coupled with calls for the VPO to somehow acknowledge having been the nth party to snub Price and her music, and to apologize. Ultimately, though, the offending parties’ hopes that public displeasure with their wrongdoing would simply go away met with success. To this date there’s been no public apology or admission of wrongdoing. Despite the initial protests, eventually the musical world accepted the assertion that “gee, this was just an honest misunderstanding; we certainly never intended to mislead anyone when we said that Florence Price composed a piece that we created ourselves” with little more than a shrug. YNS and the VPO have issued no acknowledgment of the forgery or its motives, and there certainly has been no public apology to Florence Price.

That, obviously, is not the good news. The news that IS good centers on Price’s beloved Adoration. Anybody who knows anything about the latter-day Price movement knows that Adoration, originally written for organ and published in The Organ Portfolio in 1951, became something of an anthem during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-21, with dozens of new performances popping up on YouTube and social media during those dire days; the stream has continued at a slightly slower, but still steady, rate since then: a tribute to Adoration’s poignant, soul-searching beauty, melodic genius, and harmonic richness.

Here comes the good news: in 2019, on the eve of that surge in its popularity, Adoration was arranged for string orchestra by noted U.S. composer and arranger Elaine Fine; and on June 19, 2026, that arrangement was performed by the Vienna Philharmonic in their annual Summer Night Concert (Sommernachtskonzert) in Vienna’s beautiful Schönbrunn Palace. The performance, conducted by Swiss conductor Lorenzo Viotti, was as beautiful as the concert locale, the beautiful summer evening, and Price’s music itself. You can listen to it beginning at 25’51” here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tWoZ_tUmEU

And public response was appropriately warm and appreciative (two comments are attached here, courtesy of Fine; the second writer made a gentle but pointed reference to the VPO's “Rainbow Waltz” forgery). Here are two comments, both courtesy of Elaine Fine (the second makes a gentle but pointed reference to YN-S’s and the VPO’s forgery earlier this year):

(The English translation of the second comment leaves out an important element: the German original says that “the orchestral arrangement by Elaine Fine, fortunately, is much more reminiscent of the original” than the VPO’s Rainbow Waltz arrangement was.)

It’s a refreshing turn of events – still not the much-needed public apology from the VPO et al., but at least something done right where a great wrong was done before. There’s some gratification in that. The orchestra is the same – but in Fine and Viotti, Florence Price has found genuine artistic advocates, a marked contrast to, y’know, what happened in January.

The second installment in this tetralogy of glad tidings takes us from Vienna to Paris. Check back here on June 29 for that news!