Proms 2026 Chineke! Orchestra with Angel Blue

Europe’s first majority-Black and ethnically diverse orchestra Chineke! is back. It opens with the premiere of a suite drawn from music for a ballet left incomplete by the South Carolina-born Edmund Thornton Jenkins, who died aged only 32. American soprano Angel Blue sings Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 – a child’s all-encompassing vision of life in a teeming urban centre – as well as new arrangements of songs by some of 20th-century America’s greatest tunesmiths. After the interval we swap cities for forests and fields in the ecstatic nature hymn that is Dvořák’s Symphony No. 8.

Programme to include new arrangements of songs by Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, Margaret Bonds, George Gershwin and Richard Rodgers.

Angel Blue © Dario Acosta