BBC Concert Orchestra: Streets of America

What brings you here? Have you ever been evicted? Have you ever been denied a lease or loan? The American composer Gabriel Kahane didn’t have any answers until he started talking to the homeless of contemporary America. emergency shelter intake form is his response: a very modern oratorio, performed for the first time in the UK by the BBC Concert Orchestra. The classical tradition collides with the voices – and the lived experience – of homeless people and the result is passionate, direct and startlingly sincere. Conductor Kwamé Ryan opens with two more American cityscapes: West Side Story is as thrilling now as it was in 1957, but the tragedy at its heart is as raw, and as real, as ever.