Manhattan Intermezzo (2016) / Keith Emerson / Neil Sedaka

This programme brings together four works for piano and orchestra by composers best known from the fields of jazz, popular song and progressive rock. Neil Sedaka’s Manhattan Intermezzo explores the New York of today and yesterday with its melting pot of nationalities. Keith Emerson is best known as a founding member of Emerson Lake & Palmer. His remarkably inventive semi-autobiographical Piano Concerto No. 1 fuses his classical training with jazz. Duke Ellington’s sublime New World a-Comin’ is a visualisation of improved conditions for black people in America, while the rarely heard original version of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue represents the quintessential style of New York City in the Roaring Twenties.