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Four Symphonic Works with the National Symphony Orchestra conducted by Gianandrea Noseda features a collection by John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’ Composer-in-Residence, Carlos Simon. Each piece was recorded live in concert and initially released digitally, one at a time, throughout the season. The final release, a collection of all four works.

The recording features Simon’s short orchestral study, The Block, which takes inspiration from the visual art of the late Romare Bearden, an artist whose work reflected African American life in urban cities as well as the rural American south.

Tales—A Folklore Symphony delves into African American culture and folklore. The work is an exploration of African American folklore and Afrofuturist stories.

Songs of Separation for mezzo-soprano and orchestra was commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra in connection with Simon’s appointment as Composer-in-Residence. The work takes its inspiration from a set of four poems by the 13th-century Persian poet and Sufi mystic Jalāl al-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī and features mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges.

Completing the album is the composer’s Wake Up! Concerto for Orchestra, inspired by the poem Awake, Asleep, written by the Nepali poet Rajendra Bhandari. The poet, “warns of the danger of being obliviously asleep in a social world, but yet how collective wakefulness provides ‘a bountiful harvest of thoughts,’” said Simon in his liner notes.

J’Nai Bridges, Mezzo-Soprano 
National Symphony Orchestra
Gianandrea Noseda, Conductor