Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra

In 1961 Bernstein revisited the score for West Side Story and extracted nine sections to assemble what he called the Symphonic Dances. The suite opens with the famous confrontation of the Jets and the Sharks. The haunting strains of Somewhere contrast with the lively Latin dances of the Mambo andCha-cha. The Cool fugue features a 12-tone scale, and segues into the final, deadly fight between the gangs in Rumble, whilst a solo flute plays I Had a Love to close the suite, which ends, like the musical, on a haunting, unresolved chord. A Symphonic Picture is a colourful cavalcade of melody – a sort of symphonic synopsis of the operatic scenario of Porgy & Bess. It seamlessly links all the biggest hit songs from the show includingSummertime, I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin’, Bess, You is My Woman Now and It Ain’t Necessarily So.

The Chairman Dances is a 'foxtrot for orchestra' that Adams composed while working on his opera Nixon in China. The music is representative of a combination of minimalist iterations and stylised pseudo jazz inflections, chugging rhythms and colourful orchestration and diatonic harmonies. The Fourth Piano Concerto displays much of the spacious style and the demanding virtuosity of Rachmaninov’s earlier concertos, wrapped up in a structure of tightly coiled drama. But it also inhabits a world of its own; it is a work very much of its time, incorporating not only the remnants of late Romanticism but also some up-to-date sounds of Ravel and Gershwin – reflecting Rachmaninov’s musical curiosity and evolving style.