Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra Announces Programming and Featured Artists For 2020 Classical Roots Concert

The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (CSO) has announced the program and featured artists for its annual Classical Roots concert on April 22, 2022 at 7:30pm at Cincinnati Music Hall. Led by conductor John Morris Russell, the CSO will celebrate "Black Voices and Stories from American Music and Theater" with selections from opera, film, and Broadway.

Highlights include the music of Ragtime and The Wiz and arias from Terence Blanchard's highly-acclaimed opera Fire Shut Up in My Bones and Gregory Spears' Castor and Patience, which will receive its world premiere with Cincinnati Opera this July. The Classical Roots program will also pay tribute to Cincinnati's Grammy Award-winning gospel group, Charles Fold Singers, celebrating its 50th Anniversary in 2021.

The CSO will be joined by the Classical Roots Community Choir with choir soloists Ciara Harper and Noël Walton, led by Resident Conductor William Henry Caldwell; talented young musicians of the CSO's Nouveau Program, coached by Felipe Morales-Torres and Artistic Advisor Marion Peraza de Webb; opera sensation Talise Trevigne; and Emmy, Tony and SAG award nominee Norm Lewis, the first African American actor to perform as the Phantom in Broadway's long-running production of Phantom of the Opera. Lewis recently starred in Spike Lee's critically acclaimed Da 5 Bloods.