VALDOSTA – Florence Price is partially overcoming New Yorker music critic Alex Ross’ description of classical music composers – “white, male and dead.”

Seventy years after her death, Price’s work is being discovered by audiences throughout the United States and the world.

This weekend, the Valdosta Symphony Orchestra will perform Price’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in D Major, featuring the renowned violinist Melissa White as guest artist.

In performing Price’s Violin Concerto, Valdosta audiences will hear a performance that inspired rave reviews for White nationwide. In 2020, White performed the concerto with the National Philharmonic, a performance called “absolutely breathtaking” by Katie Gaab, Maryland Theatre Guide critic, and “an excellent advocate, prioritizing ease and fluency over intensity, suiting the music’s lyric and episodic nature,” according to Matthew Guerrieri with The Washington Post.

Howard Hsu, Valdosta Symphony Orchestra music director and conductor, noted, “White has received acclaim for solo performances with leading ensembles such as the Cleveland Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra and the Pittsburgh Symphony.”

White’s rise as a soloist gained national attention in the past year. In June, she made her recital debut at Carnegie Hall, according to biographiacal information on her website.

In addition to claiming such classical music performance prizes as being a first-place laureate in the Sphinx Competition, White has performed with pop stars such as Pharrell, Bruno Mars, Alicia Keys and Lauryn Hill, according to her biography. She is a founding member of the New York City-based Harlem Quartet.

In performing the Price Violin Concerto, White plays a work that was all but forgotten and nearly lost.

”The music of American composer Florence Price has recently gained worldwide popularity and recognition after decades of neglect,” Hsu noted.

Interest in Price’s compositions has piqued in the past 20 years after a large cache of her music was found in the broken-down house that had been her summer home in St. Anne, Ill., according to Allen M. Rothenberg’s Program Notes provided by the Valdosta Symphony Orchestra.

Price was a rarity – a Black woman composing classical music in America during the first half of the 20th century. She died in 1953.

”Not only did Price fail to enter the (musical) canon; a large quantity of her music came perilously close to obliteration,” Alex Ross, the New Yorker critic, wrote. “That run-down house in St. Anne is a potent symbol of how a country can forget its cultural history.”

The Violin Concerto was among the compositions discovered in the house.

”Composed in 1939, there is no record of any performances before the first modern performance in 2018,” according to Program Notes. “John Michael Cooper, a musicologist who specializes in under-recognized composers of color, notes that the first concerto ‘is in some ways a microcosm of the issues that (Price) faced throughout her creative career … On the one hand, it demonstrates her fluency in the idioms of Euro-American classical repertoire … On the other hand, those idioms are counterbalanced by elements from Black vernacular such as spirituals and jazz.”

In addition to the Price Violin Concerto, the audience can expect to hear Tchaikovsky’s “Polonaise” from “Eugene Onegin” and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 in E Minor during “Rush,” the Valdosta Symphony’s opening concert of the 2023-24 season.

The performance is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 30, Whitehead Auditorium, Valdosta State University Fine Arts Building, corner of Brookwood and Oak. Pre-concert chat at 6:45 p.m. More information, tickets: Visit valdostasymphony.org or call (229) 333-2150.