BBC Concert Orchestra 2026-2027 Friday Night is Music Night: Music from America

Friday Night Is Music Night comes to Bristol Beacon, with a road trip across American music in all its stars and stripes.

The charismatic Leonard Bernstein is represented by the fizzing overture from his second musical, Candide, which opened on Broadway 70 years ago this year. Central to American’s rich cultural melting pot are the African roots of jazz and the scintillating rhythms of Latin America – reflected in turn by Duke Ellington’s Solitude with its glamorous, sweeping strings, and by John Adams’ arrangement of Astor Piazzolla’s darkly swirling tango ‘La Mufa’ (Misfortune). Adams himself (80 this year) gave Minimalism – another style ‘born in the USA’ – a human face and funky groove, as we hear in The Chairman Dances, from his opera inspired by the historic meeting in 1972 of President Nixon with Chairman Mao of China.

Another leading living American composer, Jennifer Higdon, invites us to mark our Dance Card, while the dance hall meets the concert hall in Morton Gould’s colourful Second American Symphonette. And it’s no surprise that the country that turned slapstick into global entertainment also gave us Leroy Anderson, the master of the musical fizz, bang, wallop.