Symphonic Ellington: Sacred Concerts
Thomas Wilkins leads the LA Phil in Ellington’s spiritual Sacred Concerts, which the composer called the most important music he ever wrote, as well as his narrative history of Black America, Black, Brown & Beige.
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Symphonic Ellington: Sacred Concerts
In 1943, Duke Ellington premiered two works about the experience of Black Americans—one, Black, Brown, and Beige, traced their collective history and another, New World A-Coming, imagined a hopeful future. Ellington wrote about the latter in his biography, “I visualized this new world as a place in the distant future, where there would be no war, no greed, no categorization, no non-believers, where love was unconditional, and no pronoun was good enough for God.”
Within the context of the orchestra, Ellington explored these themes, as well as his faith, in many forms, from sacred concerts to extended suites to tone poems. He brought the full range of his musical vocabulary to bear on his symphonic work, weaving spirituals, jazz, blues, and even West Indian dance music into his orchestrations. In two programs over four nights, Thomas Wilkins leads the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a weekend dedicated to the orchestral music of a great American composer.
