Slowly but surely, our perceptions of what a composer looked like in the early 20th century are widening. Chineke!’s ongoing mission to unearth music by forgotten Black composers here brought about the belated premiere of Ballet by Edmund Thornton Jenkins, its incomplete manuscript parts reconstructed by his great-nephew Tuffus Zimbabwe.
Growing up in Charleston, South Carolina, Jenkins died in Paris aged only 32, having made a name for himself as a rising composer and band leader. In between he studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where in 1918 he wrote his three-movement Ballet. It sounded persuasive here, as conducted by Jonathon Heyward. A substantial opening Processional, ominous then light-footed, gives way to a second movement beginning with a bubbling flute duet and a florid viola solo; together, these repeatedly show a gift for weaving together melody and countermelody. The flaw is in the finale, where the waltz that dominates the movement sounds unavoidably slender and staid next to the trumpet fanfare that announces it. Still, Jenkins rounds things off with an exuberant, uptempo ending.
That was where the discoveries ended in this Prom – it was a pity that a song by Margaret Bonds had been quietly dropped from the programme. The rest of the first half was a showcase for the US soprano Angel Blue. In Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915, the words of the poet James Agee didn’t always make it across the hall, but her gleaming tone, the childish innocence of her character and the music’s atmosphere of intense nostalgia certainly did.
A change of frock later Blue returned to the stage, microphone in hand, and powered rather self-indulgently through four Great American Songbook standards. She relied a lot on charm, singing My Funny Valentine directly to the front rows, but these songs didn’t all get the vocal polish they deserve: in Puttin’ On the Ritz the high point was Richard Kelley’s trumpet solo.
The whole orchestra, not least its versatile and superbly blended brass section, was on form in Dvořák’s Symphony No 8. Heyward shaped a performance full of momentum, setting electric tempos and driving the finale to its close with breathless excitement.
• Available on BBC Sounds until 12 October. The Proms continue until 12 September.
