Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra: New Year's Concert

Few conductors can get the party started like Alondra de la Parra, who presides over our New Year festivities in a concert that mingles her native Mexico with the sounds of America.

They knew how to celebrate in the roaring twenties, the decade that delivered George Gershwin’s landmark fusion of blues, jazz and classical music Rhapsody in Blue, played here by Thomas Encho, a versatile pianist who certainly knows how to swing.

After Gershwin’s Rhapsody and his Promenade – written to accompany Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Shall we Dance – we hear from the composer who was a child of the jazz age and arguably inherited Gershwin’s mantle. Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story fuse the energy, rhythm and passion of Latin musical rhythms with the structures and forms of classical music.

What Bernstein did with flair in 1960, Arturo Márquez did with sheer brilliance in 1994 when he wrote what has become the quintessential example of Mexican dance music realized through the classical orchestra – the red-hot, ultra-cool Danzón No 2.