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2020 may prove pivotal in our collective journey towards racial justice. But in his devised work, Concerto No.1: SERMON, Davóne Tines warns against complacency. The bass-baritone weaves readings of texts by African American writers including James Baldwin and Langston Hughes, plus a newly commissioned poem by jessica Care moore, selected to amplify arias by John Adams, Anthony Davis and by Tines and Igee Dieudonné. A post-2020 wake-up-call about discovering your potential, exhibiting your humanity and indicting your naysayers.

Then comes a symphony influenced by African American spirituals, which the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák (then working in New York) saw as the ‘the folk songs of America’. It remains one of his most enduringly popular works. Our Principal Guest Conductor opens her concert with Anna Thorvaldsdóttir’s hypnotic orchestral canvas Dreaming – an image of the orchestra as a living organism twisting through a kaleidoscope of colour and light.

Please note: Davóne Tines’s Concerto No. 1: SERMON contains racist language in reflecting its themes of inequality and injustice.