John Adams Festival: RNCM Symphony Orchestra at RNCM

The RNCM Symphony Orchestra charts a musical journey through 20th-century American life in its contribution to the Hallé’s John Adams Festival.

From parades and assembly lines to protest anthems and pop culture, the programme traces a century of grit, humour, struggle and invention. It takes in an evocative work by Adams himself, plus music by fellow American composers who celebrate, question and reimagine the nation’s stories.

At the heart of the concert is My Father Knew Charles Ives – Adams’ radiant, three-movement homage to a composer who shaped his own musical imagination. Part memoir, part portrait of New England, it conjures summer parades, lakeside dances and looming mountains, woven with distant trumpets, ghostly marching bands and affectionate nods to Ives’ restless spirit. The result is a work that blurs memory and invention, autobiography and national myth.

Naturally, Charles Ives also features in the programme, with a patriotic tune that might sound oddly British. Variations on America is a wry, irreverent take on the song also known as My Country, ’Tis of Thee, rooted in God Save the King. Full of harmonic surprises and rhythmic mischief, Ives’ early work shows his signature humour and taste for parody.

Michael Daugherty’s Fire and Blood shifts the focus to Detroit in the 1930s, drawing inspiration from Diego Rivera’s monumental Detroit Industry Murals. Here, the solo violin becomes the factory worker, weaving through a landscape of pounding orchestral textures that evoke the rhythms of the assembly line. Gritty and propulsive, the piece celebrates real-world heroism and the energy of America’s industrial age.

In Soul Force, Jessie Montgomery turns the lens to the civil rights struggle, taking her title from a phrase used by Martin Luther King Jr. in his I Have a Dream speech. Blending big band, funk, hip hop and R&B within a symphonic frame, Montgomery creates an electrifying sound world that honours resilience and protest while looking to the future with defiance and hope.

Together, these works reveal America in all its contradictions – playful and profound, industrial and idealistic – while placing Adams’ own voice in dialogue with his country’s past and present.

Part of the RNCM’s Autumn Season.