Making America: Blanchard, Herrmann & Latimer

In Hollywood, exiles and outsiders weaved American dreams, writing music that made the silver screen shine. Music from the golden age of the movies frames tonight’s concert, and from the haunted obsession of Bernard Herrmann’s classic Hitchcock score to Korngold’s The Sea Hawk – an all-action swashbuckler from Vienna’s brightest star – no emotion is off limits. It sounds glorious too – even without the pictures.

This is the first chance to hear music from Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up In My Bones, whose barnstorming run at the Metropolitan Opera in 2021 proved a major landmark in American music. Blanchard’s Grammy-winning “opera in jazz” explores a troubled childhood in 1980s Louisiana, while Ryan Latimer’s brand-new trumpet concerto with the young Austrian trumpeter Selina Ott takes its inspiration from the wildlife (real or imaginary) of Florida.