Florence Price composed her Violin Concerto No. 2 in 1952. As violinist Rachel Barton Pine remarked before performing it with the Fairfax Symphony Orchestra led by Christopher Zimmerman Saturday night, its creation seems to have been driven by a pure personal need to write a concerto. Price had not received a commission, and no one performed it before she died a year later. Price never had a publisher, a circumstance likely explained by the prejudices she had to contend with as a black woman.

This concerto was lost to history until its manuscript was found in a trunk in an abandoned house in 2009, along with many other Price compositions. It was a fortuitous discovery, as Saturday’s performance at the George Mason University’s Center for the Arts showed.