Season Opening / The Philadelphia Orchestra by Various, T 30 aug 2022, Alates (2022/2022), Dirigent Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg, Germany

MADE IN USA Of the four American composers chosen by the Philadelphia Orchestra and its principal conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin for the second concert in the »Elbphilharmonie Sommer« festival, Samuel Barber is certainly the best known. But, as with Barber, the orchestral works by Gabriela Lena Frank, Valerie Coleman and Florence Price also feature influences from the worlds of jazz and folk music. Worlds that have always been part of the »American way of music«. In Barber’s »Knoxville: Summer of 1915«, the soprano Angel Blue evokes an era of peace and hope. In Valerie Coleman’s vocal work »This Is Not a Small Voice«, African-American culture proudly raises its voice. And while Gabriela Lena Frank combines western classical forms with Latin American rhythms in her orchestral work »Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout«, Florence Price’s Symphony No. 1 is the first symphonic work by a black woman to be performed by a major American orchestra. And Yannick Nézet-Séguin has absolutely no doubt: this symphony, even with its jazz harmonies, »comes across as American through and through«.