“Joy comes well at such a needy time,” says Juliet as her life begins to unravel—a line that comes to mind all too often at this moment in American history. So, Good News Mass, an LAPhil commission now receiving its world premiere, sounds like just what the doctor ordered. Carlos Simon, a preacher’s son forbidden as a child to listen to any music other than gospel, has evolved into a code-switching composer and educator as much at home in the classics as in African-American idioms. Described as “a celebratory homage to Black joy, spiritual discovery, and the power of faith,” Simon’s new choral work harks back to the church services of his childhood in Atlanta even as he tips his hat to Leonard Bernstein’s wildly eclectic MASS. We’re guessing a solo part for the tenor Zebulon Ellis corresponds to that of Bernstein’s focal Celebrant. Video by Melina Matsoukas, the creator of award-winning spectacles for Beyoncé and Rihanna, is sure to add to the excitement. To raise the curtain on the main event, Gustavo Dudamel has scheduled Bernstein’s Divertimento and the single-movement Violin Concerto No. 2 of Florence Price. The Bernstein, in 14 quick-sketch movements (“Sennets and Tuckets,” “Samba,” “Sphinxes,” “Turkey Trot,” etc.) is the kind of music The New Yorker’s Saul Steinberg might have written had he written music. The Price is a signature piece for the violinist Randall Goosby, a polished and eloquent champion for the composer who complained of two disadvantages: she was Black, and she was a woman. As the record shows, the premiere of her first symphony—by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1933—constituted the first performance of a Black woman’s work by a top American orchestra. But it opened no doors. Only now is Price coming into her own. —Matthew Gurewitsch