An American in Paris

In the centenary year of his death, the orchestra begins with Charlestonian Rhapsody by Edmund Thornton Jenkins, an American composer who emigrated to London and found success as both a performer and composer.
 

Next up is music by Royal Philharmonic Society Instrumentalist Award winner Jasdeep Singh Degun, whose concerto for sitar and orchestra, Arya, brings together Indian and European sounds.
 

‘It’s really not a matter of different worlds meeting,’ he reflects. ‘It’s just me: as much as I’m immersed in Indian classical music, I’m a product of this country; I’m a British composer.’
 

He wrote his sitar concerto during a residency at Benjamin Britten’s home in Aldeburgh, and his approach to music-making is always instinctive, organic and unprejudiced.
 

Then after the interval he rounds off his performance with another short piece combining the sitar with the western sounds of the orchestra in Lament.
 

Zoltan Kodály’s Dances of Galánta draws on folk songs of his motherland to paint the musical image of the small Hungarian market town of Galanta, famous for its gypsy band.
 

And we round out this concert with Gershwin’s An American in Paris, the composer’s love letter to his home of New York and the dissonance one feels being immersed in foreign culture.