Featuring Music from Copland House: Jorell Williams, baritone Suliman Tekalli, violin Alexis Pia Gerlach, cello Michael Boriskin, piano PROGRAM Tom Cipullo: I Hear America Singing Margaret Bonds: I, Too, Sing America Harry T. Burleigh: From the Southland Shawn Okpebholo: Two Black Churches, and folk song arrangements Tania Leon: Elegia a Paul Robeson Dorothy Rudd Moore: Weary Blues William Grant Still: Suite for Violin and Piano plus songs by Kurt Weill, Richard Rodgers, Margaret Bonds, and others Ticket holders are invited to a post-performance ‘OFFBEAT/ONSTAGE’ talk with the artists. The beloved and formidable Maya Angelou once wrote a lyric for composer Richard Danielpour, in which her fearless speaker exclaimed “I’ve got a magic charm / That I keep up my sleeve,” from a song called Life Doesn’t Frighten Me. The words proudly point to the power and resilience of the human spirit – which this exhilarating concert salutes on this important but long-overlooked day in American history. This wide-ranging program reaches back into the late-19th-century parlor-style, folk-based music of the pioneer Harry Burleigh (one of the greatest champions of Black spirituals) and the vibrant music, literary, and art worlds of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s through to one of the 20th-century’s most prominent African-American composers, William Grant Still, and down to such present-day musical leaders as Tania Leon and Shawn Okpebholo.