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In 1996 George Walker became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music – and tonight Joshua Ellicott joins the orchestra for the long-overdue UK premiere of the work that won the award. The beautiful Lilacs is the focus of a programme spotlighting the vibrancy of American music in the last century: two works inspired by painters, Antheil’s buoyant homage to Delacroix and Schuller’s jazz-inflected tribute to Klee, are joined by Ives’s evocation of the world’s greatest urban park and Gershwin’s indelible Rhapsody in Blue.