The 2026 edition of the BBC Proms is underway! With a Transatlantic first night, the BBC Symphony Chorus and BBC Symphony Orchestra under Dalia Stasevska were joined by pianist Yunchan Lim for a special performance of Ravel‘s Piano Concerto.
Flanking this were two pieces celebrating America’s 250th ‘birthday’, Copland‘s Fanfare for the Common Man and Gershwin‘s An American in Paris, while French-British composer Josephine Stephenson was the ideal choice to write a first night premiere, That the sunrise not leave us unmoved.
Wrapping up the night was a rare performance of Finzi‘s For St Cecilia, a choral work of typical mystery and elegance but one that deserved its rare moment in the sun. Choral and orchestral forces then gave an encore of the Oasis song Wonderwall, acknowledging the England team’s prowess in the World Cup. A red card for its choice, I’m afraid – and a shame to have Finzi’s contribution immediately overshadowed in this way. Wonderwall is a great song, but felt miscast here.
Enough of my griping, though – as we should acknowledge many people enjoyed the inclusion, and the night as a whole was a celebratory indication of what we can expect to indulge in over the next eight weeks. Truly something for everyone.
Janai Brugger (narrator/soprano), CBSO Chorus (Julian Wilkins, chorus-master), City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Kazuki Yamada
Copland Fanfare for the Common Man (1942); Lincoln Portrait (1942) Tower Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman (1989) Price orch. Rosner The Heart of a Woman (c1930-50) Adams Harmonium (1980-81)
Symphony Hall, Birmingham Saturday 4 July 2026
Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse
Marking the 250th anniversary of American independence, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and music director Kazuki Yamada duly pulled out the stops with a programme that placed musical achievements from the past century within an unlikely yet stimulating context.
The first half unfolded as two diptychs focussing, respectively, on male and female concerns. Thus a brazen but never brash take on Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man preceded his Lincoln Portrait – its sentiments as apposite to World War Two as to the American Civil War, after whose Battle of Gettysburg Lincoln made his famous ‘Address’. Yamada drew nobility and fervour from its lengthy preamble, then Janai Brugger delivered its subsequent narration with enough poise and understatement to offset any risk of hubris during the climactic stages.
Initiated by a visceral reading of Joan Tower’s Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, its brass and percussion deployed in notably combative manner, the female response continued with Florence Price’s The Heart of a Woman. Not so much a song-cycle as a ‘themed’ collection which has only recently been assembled from its composer’s extensive contribution to this genre, its 10 settings of black American authors have been orchestrated by Israeli-American composer Lior Rosner with no mean subtlety and eloquence, though on occasion softening the harmonic piquancy with which Price seeks to highlights aspects of her own experience.
Wistful and rapturous by turns, these merge into a rather generalized sequence lacking any more cumulative intensity to justify it as a whole; the exception being Don’t you say no to me which, with its vivid (if slightly self-conscious) elements of blues and ragtime, sounds like a number such as Ella Fitzgerald might have recorded in her youth. Brugger (with kit-percussionist Alex Henshaw-Van den Bos) made the most of its insouciance, with Yamada encouraging the orchestra to a warmly empathetic response elsewhere. Hardly a revelatory discovery, but attractive and affecting music such as reinforced the impression that Price is at her best freed from those formal constraints encountered in her symphonies or concertos.
After the interval came Harmonium, by which John Adams established his wider reputation almost 45 years ago. Now as then, its overall impact belies its relative concision and, while its streamlined ebb and flow arguably overrides the manifest ambivalence in John Donne’s Negative Love then emphasizes predictability over pathos in Emily Dickinson’s Because I could not stop for Death, the integration of chorus and orchestra is unfailing. To this end, coordination was not all that it might have been though the seminal passages were tellingly realized – not least that seismic build-up into a setting of Dickinson’s Wild Nights whose heady crescendos then raptly inward ending, both among its composer’s finest inspirations, were conveyed with conviction boding well for the CBSO performance at this year’s Proms.
On the 250th anniversary of American independence, Arcana marks the occasion with two related fanfares. The first, well known and loved, is Aaron Copland‘s Fanfare for the Common Man, the powerhouse piece for brass and percussion that also ends his Symphony no.3:
In response, however, you might not yet know this significant piece with which Joan Tower announced her arrival on the orchestral stage, the Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman:
Finally I wanted to add a personal favourite by one of the founding fathers of American music, William Billings. The eighteenth century composer wrote a large number of hymns, and here is one of the pick – to the tune Africa:
Two days ago we noted the first performance of Aaron Copland’s ballet Rodeo in 1942. Now we look at the first performance of his Symphony no.3, which took place on this day in 1946. The Third is Copland’s flagship symphony, an impressive and powerful work that reaches its apex with music that you will no doubt recognise as the Fanfare for the Common Man, written in 1942. Here is a fine performance of the whole work from the New York Philharmonic and Leonard Bernstein, recorded for DG in 1986:
As with Rodeo, Emerson, Lake & Palmer were not far away, and their adaptation of the Fanfare for the Common Man became their biggest hit in 1977:
Published post no.2,691 – Saturday 18 October 2025
On this day in 1942, at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, the premiere of Aaron Copland’s ballet Rodeo took place. It was a wildly successful event, with no less than 22 curtain calls for a work that was to become one of Copland’s best-loved.
Often the Four Dance Episodes are performed as an extract for orchestra, and these contain two famous scenes in Buckaroo Holiday and the popular Hoe-Down, which you can enjoy below in a brilliant recording from the San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas:
Thirty years after Rodeo’s premiere, progressive rock trio Emerson, Lake & Palmer put their own inimitable stamp on the Hoe-Down, with a virtuosic tour de force that stays faithful to the original but showcases the trio’s daredevil virtuosity, especially in this concert from Milan:
Published post no.2,689 – Thursday 16 October 2025
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