The conductor Leon Botstein, known for his imaginative programming and unquenchable musical curiosity, launches a four-concert live-streamed series tonight (September 5), ‘Out of Silence: A Celebration of Music’. Conducting The Orchestra Now (TŌN) at the Bard College Conservatory in Upstate New York, Botstein and fellow conductors James Bagwell, Zachary Schwartzmann and Andrés Rivers, pair works by Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Dvořák and Bartók – all past subjects of the Bard Music Festival – with music by ten prominent black composers – ranging from Classical pioneer Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges to contemporary Americans Alvin Singleton, Adolphus Hailstork and Jessie Montgomery.

Programme 1 (tonight, September 5 at 5.30pm EST/10.30pm BST/11.30pm CET) juxtaposes Mendelssohn’s String Symphony No 8 with two works by William Grant Still – 'Out of the Silence' from Seven Traceries (1939) and Serenade (1957) – and George Walker’s Lyric for Strings (1946). Walker was a pupil of Nadia Boulanger (who was to have been the focus of this summer’s festival) and the first African-American winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music.

Programme 2 (September 12, 5.30pm) features Dvořák’s Serenade for strings alongside Jessie Montgomery’s Strum (2018), Alvin Singelton’s After Choice (2009) and Adolphus Hailstork’s Sonata da Chiesa (1990).

Programme 3 (September 19, 5.30pm) contains Tchaikovsky’s String Serenade, Roque Cordero’s Adagio trágico (1972) and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Four Novelettes (1903).

The series ends with Programme 4 (September 26, 5.30pm) and Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, which is joined by Duke Ellington’s Solitude (1941) and Sophisticated Lady (1932) and Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges’s Violin Concerto in G, Op 2 No 1 (1773) with Ashley Horne (violin).

Botstein, the Founder and Co-Artistic Director of the Bard Music Festival, and the President of Bard College, explains that ‘the series takes its title from the opening work on this series, by William Grant Still. Out of the Silence therefore carries two meanings: the return of music to the public stage after months of silence, and the foregrounding of music too long kept in the shadows, music by Black composers who have never gotten their proper due on the concert stages of the world. As the performance of music begins anew, Bard will pioneer, as it has in the past, on behalf of those composers and works of music left, unjustly, in obscurity.’

The four concerts can be watched live on Upstreaming, the Fisher Center’s virtual stage. All programme are free but reservations are requested.