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Composer: Price, Florence

Composer: Still, William Grant

Composer: Dawson, William Levi

Composer: Burleigh, Harry Thacker

Dvorak's Prophecy - A New Narrative for American Classical Music: Film 3: The Souls of Black Folk and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music

Deas, Kevin

Conductor: Fagen, Arthur

Conductor: Jeter, James

Television Director: Horowitz, Joseph

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Bass-baritone: Deas, Kevin

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Year of Production: 2021

Playing Time: 01:24:24

Catalogue Number: 2.110700

UPC: 747313570058

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If George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess - the highest creative achievement in American classical music - embodies a glorious (and controversial) fulfillment of Dvorak's prophecy, there also exists a buried lineage of exceptional compositions of Black composers following in Dvorak's wake. Coming first was his assistant Harry Burleigh whose seminal settings of Deep River are as much compositions as transcriptions. Burleigh's initiative was sealed by singers like Paul Robeson and Marian Anderson. But William Levi Dawson's oracular Negro Folk Symphony, though triumphantly premiered by Leopold Stokowski and his Philadelphia Orchestra in 1934, gathered dust - and Dawson was never to create the symphonic catalogue he seemed destined to undertake.

The commentators include George Shirley, the most legendary name in present-day Black classical music, also Kevin Deas, who sings Burleigh with singular authority, and the conductors Roderick Cox and the late Michael Morgan.