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Live at the Â鶹Éç Proms: Chineke! Orchestra conducted by Jonathon Heyward, with soprano Angel Blue in a programme including Barber and Dvorak.

Presented by Katie Derham live from the Royal Albert Hall, London.

Edmund Thornton Jenkins: Dance Suite (reconstr. & arr. Tuffus Zimbabwe; world premiere)
Samuel Barber: Knoxville: Summer of 1915

c.8.00pm
Interval: Alisha Jones talks to Katie Derham about the enduring power of the Great American Songbook: influential songs written between the 1920s and 1960s for Broadway musicals, Hollywood films, and Tin Pan Alley, the heart of New York City’s songwriting industry. And she looks ahead to Dvorak's optimistic 8th Symphony, which draws on Bohemian folk music.

c.8.20pm
Antonín Dvořák: Symphony No. 8 in G major

Angel Blue (soprano)
Chineke! Orchestra
Jonathon Heyward (conductor)

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. After the interval, we swap cities for forests and fields in the ecstatic nature hymn that is Dvořák’s Symphony No. 8.