Snapshots for solo piano by Florence Price

Florence Price - Snapshots for solo piano (1952)
I. Lake Mirror (October 13, 1952)
II. Moon behind a Cloud
III. Flame
Composed between 1947 and 1952, Snapshots is one of Price's most expansive piano works, and her most persistently modernist. The first movement, "Lake Mirror" —is the one most obviously indebted to the post-Romantic notions of beauty. Overall its approach is decidedly impressionistic, and some passages are post-tonal. The same aesthetic of impressionistic beauty governs "Moon behind a Cloud," whose alternation of clearly triadic, tonal materials with whole-tone and other post-tonal ones recalls that of Clouds. In the concluding movement, "Flame," dispenses entirely with the first two movements' tranquil and occasionally mysterious beauty. Instead, "Flame" is relentlessly dissonant, fueled by a conspicuously virtuosic urgency.
© John Michael Cooper (2020)

Performer: Kumi Matsuo