Orchestrating support

I am in Raleigh, North Carolina, unexpectedly invited here by my old friend Grant Llewellyn, who is in his first season as music director of the North Carolina Symphony Orchestra and enjoying both the challenge and the celebrity status it gives him in the university- and technology-rich region known as The Triangle. Llewellyn has been treating his audiences to a mini-festival of contemporary American and British music. I am about to hear what turns out to be a fine concert in the orchestra’s handsome new Meymandi Hall of works by George Benjamin, Robin Holloway, Nicholas Maw and James MacMillan.

According to your point of view, the United States of America might be God’s own country, land of opportunity, freedom and righteousness. Or it might just be the most arrogant, power-intoxicated nation state of our times, dangerously ruled by a man whom one of its own citizens has rather appealingly described to me as a ‘trumped-up fratboy’. What