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Europe’s first majority-Black and ethnically diverse orchestra Chineke! is back. It opens with the premiere of a suite drawn from music for a ballet left incomplete by the South Carolina-born Edmund Thornton Jenkins, who died aged only 32. American soprano Angel Blue sings Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 – a child’s all-encompassing vision of life in a teeming urban centre – as well as new arrangements of songs by some of 20th-century America’s greatest tunesmiths, including Richard Rodgers’s ‘My Funny Valentine’ and Irving Berlin’s ‘Puttin’ On the Ritz’. After the interval we swap cities for forests and fields in the ecstatic nature hymn that is Dvořák’s Symphony No. 8.

Angel Blue © Dario Acosta