BBC Philharmonic - City Noir

BBC Philharmonic Orchestra
John Storgårds conductor
Paul Lewis piano

Charles Ives The Unanswered Question
Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 4
John Adams City Noir

City Noir is John Adams’s musical tribute to half-lit rooms, venetian blinds, desperate men, dangerous women, secrets, lies, and the City of Angels. A symphony inspired by the iconography of 40s and 50s film noir, it weaves a dark and swaggering jazz sensibility through its three movements.

Adams’s work is cinematic in its scope. In the composer’s own words: ‘The music should have the slightly disorienting effect of a very crowded boulevard peopled with strange characters, like those of a David Lynch film – the kind who only come out very late on a very hot night.’

In the first half, we are joined by Paul Lewis, who, in his performance of Beethoven’s crystalline Piano Concerto No. 4, might just provide us with an answer to Charles Ives’ opening Unanswered Question.