About This Event

BSO Youth Concerts Conductor Thomas Wilkins leads two works by Duke Ellington. Three Black Kings, in part a symphonic elegy to Martin Luther King, was his final work. Nearly complete at his death, it was finished by his son Mercer and others. The spiritual Come Sunday is from Ellington's 1943 symphonic essay Black, Brown, and Beige. George Gershwin's Second Rhapsody, a rarely heard sequel to his Rhapsody in Blue, was premiered by the BSO in 1932 with the composer as soloist. The prominent African-American composer William Grant Still wrote his folksong influenced Symphony No. 4, Autochthonous ("indigenous"), to depict "the spirit of the American people."