(Photo credit: Bucklesweet)

Two-time Oscar nominee and six-time GRAMMY® Award-winning composer and trumpeter Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up In My Bones” Opera Suite in Concert will be presented by Strathmore and Washington Performing Arts.

Blanchard and his E-Collective have teamed up with David Balakrishnan and the double GRAMMY®-winning Turtle Island Quartet, visual artist Andrew F. Scott, and guest vocalists soprano Adrienne Danrich and baritone Justin Austin to present a new concert version of the opera. For this concert Balakrishnan pared down the orchestration from the original three hours into a 45-minute piece, all while maintaining the story’s narrative. Scott’s video projections offer audiences a richer insight into Blanchard’s artistic vision.

Some of the featured pieces are “Tears of Anger & Shame,” “Don’t Be In Such A Rush,” “Leave It In The Road ,” and “The Night Brings You.” By producing a concert version a wider audience is able to experience the history-making opera on an intimate scale. The concert is preceded by an educational program developed in collaboration with the Coalition for African Americans in the Performing Arts (CAAPA), which delves deeper into the opera’s themes of trauma, confrontation, and resilience, enriching the audience’s understanding of the performance.

The Metropolitan Opera opened its 2021 season with “Fire Shut Up In My Bones,” the first work by an African-American composer in the institution’s 138-year history. Blanchard and librettist Kasi Lemmons were commissioned to write the opera for its premiere at Opera Theatre of St. Louis in 2019. The libretto is based on the best-selling 2014 memoir of The New York Times journalist Charles M. Blow, which explores Blow’s turbulent upbringing in rural Louisiana and his struggles to transcend and overcome a cycle of violence in his life and family.

Fire Shut Up In My Bones: Opera Suite in Concert is set to take place April 26, at 8 pm at the Music Center at Strathmore.

*”Fire Shut Up In My Bones” contains mature themes and language, including content that references incidents of sexual assault and child abuse.