Borrowed & Blue

MW I – January 22 & 23
Borrowed and Blue
By David Amado

The opening concert of our 36th season explores music shaped by African and African American musical traditions—both borrowed and blue. Whether filtered through the salons of Paris or the soundstages of New York, the blues and jazz idioms that grew out of the Black experience have deeply influenced 20th-century concert music and continue to shape how composers around the world imagine musical voice and identity.

We begin with Kurt Weill’s Little Threepenny Music, drawn from his 1928 Threepenny Opera—a sly, satirical, genre-bending collaboration with playwright Bertolt Brecht. The show was a sensation in Weimar-era Berlin, and its music—equal parts cabaret, jazz, and parody—brought the grit of street life into the theater with startling freshness. This orchestral suite, arranged in 1929 for wind ensemble and rhythm section, distills the show’s most iconic moments—among them the ever-sinister Mack the Knife—into a set that swings and snarls.

Weill’s bold fusion of classical and popular idioms finds a kindred spirit in George Gershwin. His Porgy and Bess, premiered in 1935, was a radical synthesis of jazz, opera, and folk traditions—an ambitious attempt to tell an African American story on the grandest of musical stages. While its reception has been complex and not without criticism, its score remains a cornerstone of American music. Robert Russell Bennett’s Symphonic Picture gathers its most memorable tunes—from Summertime to It Ain’t Necessarily So—into a single, thrilling sweep.

Between these two trailblazers comes Camille Saint-Saëns’s Fifth Piano Concerto, nicknamed the “Egyptian.” Written in 1896 during the composer’s travels along the Nile, the piece reflects Saint-Saëns’s lifelong fascination with exotic sounds and faraway landscapes. Though filtered through a distinctly French sensibility, the concerto incorporates elements drawn from Middle Eastern and North African melodies, creating a vibrant musical postcard from a time when the “Orient” was as much imagined as it was understood. Pianist Tao Lin joins us to perform this dazzling, colorful work.

Each piece on the program navigates the intersections of cultural influence and personal voice—raising musical questions about what it means to “borrow,” and what’s born of the blues.