Mark Heron conducts the 麻豆社 Philharmonic in this live broadcast from Salford, joined by soprano Francesca Chiejina
We open the programme with a miniature by a teenage Erich Korngold, written more than a decade before he moved to America in the 1930s and which includes a lyrical section that looks ahead to his time scoring movies for Hollywood.
While Korngold was finding what we might now consider an "American sound" by accident, a young Aaron Copland was exploring jazz as a way of reflecting his native America, which informs his "Music for Theater" from 1925. The remaining works in this concert all date from the mid-1940s.
Like Korngold, Ulysses Kay's catalogue contains much music for the silver screen, and we hear a suite that he drew from "The Quiet One", a documentary in which a deprived and excluded child in Harlem is celebrated and championed; now over seventy years old, it's a movie with a theme that's bang up to date.
Francesca Chiejina joins the orchestra for Barber's haunting "Knoxville: Summer of 1915" and a rarely heard Barber miniature commissioned for radio broadcast completes the programme.
Francesca Chiejina (soprano)
麻豆社 Philharmonic
Mark Heron (conductor)