Open Rehearsal in London: Gershwin and Marsalis with Nicola Benedetti

Programme

Our series Let Freedom Ring: Celebrating the Sounds of America continues with music by three American composers bridging the worlds of classical music and jazz.

Wynton Marsalis has won nine Grammy Awards, for both jazz and classical recordings, and has been at the forefront of the American music scene for decades. His violin concerto, composed in 2015 for the Philharmonia’s Featured Artist Nicola Benedetti, embraces the fiddle melodies of Benedetti’s native Scotland, African-American spirituals, marching bands, blues and gospel, and ends with a foot-stomping hootenanny. It’s a musical embodiment of America’s myriad migration stories, sometimes deeply soulful, sometimes swirling with joyous energy.

Three Black Kings was Duke Ellington’s final composition, commissioned by Dance Theater Harlem as a tribute to Martin Luther King. Ellington’s piece for jazz band and symphony orchestra ends with a gospel-inspired eulogy to the great civil rights leader. But first he invokes two earlier kings renowned for their wisdom and faith – Balthazar, traditionally one of the wise men who visited the child Jesus, and the Old Testament King Solomon.

Gershwin’s 1935 opera Porgy and Bess, with its use of American folk idioms, its head-on engagement with poverty and racism, and the composer’s stipulation that it should be sung by an all-Black cast, is a landmark in American musical history. Tonight’s ‘Symphonic Picture’ features many of the opera’s unforgettable moments, including ‘Bess, You Is My Woman Now’, ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’, and ‘Summertime’.

Part of Let Freedom Ring