With Covid on the march, live music-making is more precious than ever. The concert given by Chineke! Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall last Monday – conducted by Roderick Cox, being streamed on YouTube from 12 October – mattered especially to me. Four years ago I included the barely known African American composer Florence Price (1887-1953) in a book. It was a risk. Admired in her day, Price had completed more than 300 works, many only discovered in 2009, rotting in boxes in her ramshackle home in Illinois. Scarcely any examples, published or recorded, were available. That which I did track down was intriguing – the opening movement (all I could find) of the Symphony No 1 in E minor (1933).

On Monday, in an audience of only six, I at last heard, in a high-quality and spirited performance, this symphony in full. The music is distinctive, emotional, bursting with melody; not experimental, but expressive and confident. Dvořák’s New World symphony meets Gershwin (who attended the first performance), but Price’s own musical personality holds sway. Fairly standard orchestral writing is vitalised by the unexpected: swanee whistle, tom-toms, celesta, chimes; jaunty, striding string tunes, heady brass chorales and some rich, mellifluous writing for clarinet. Chineke! embraced its episodic charms with elegance, making a convincing case.

This orchestra, vastly broadening our listening horizons as it develops its own identity and repertoire, also gave a secure if stately account of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 3 (Nicolas van Poucke an assured soloist) and revisited a work it’s played before, Avril Coleridge-Taylor’s Sussex Landscape (1936). Coleridge-Taylor, daughter of Samuel, was the first female conductor of HMS Royal Marines, among other distinctions. Full of cymbal crashes, rippling harp and climactic drama, her turbulent tone poem turns the gentle Sussex landscape into the kind of place wolves might like.

• Chineke! feature on BBC Four’s Black Classical Music: The Forgotten History