Winner of the Solti Conducting Award, Berlin-based American conductor Roderick Cox presents a relative rarity along with Ravel and Prokofiev: William Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony. Premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1934, it won over an enthusiastic audience and critics, one of whom wrote “[it is] the most distinctive and promising American symphonic proclamation which has so far been achieved,” and yet it was scarcely performed since. Written in the tradition of American post-Romantics, Dawson’s remarkable achievement uses African American folk material and works it into a sophisticated orchestral fabric. Virtuoso Karen Gomyo joins in for Prokofiev’s tuneful First Violin Concerto, and Cox concludes with the ultimate musical sensuality of Ravel’s Daphnis.