The Buffalo Philharmonic is performing a concert this weekend called American Resilience and it is a way to honor the heroes we lost in 9/11.
John Morris Russell is principal pops conductor for both the Buffalo and Cincinnati Philharmonic Orchestras. On September 11th he will lead the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra in a special memorial concert, American Resilience 20th Anniversary Commemoration to 9/11 Heroes.
John Morris Russell says when we started planning this concert, he couldn’t believe the incredible amount of time that has passed. He says, we knew we wanted to on one hand to be able to memorialize this moment in time and to recognize those people who lost their lives but at the same time we also wanted to recognize American resilience. He goes on to say we wanted to be able to, through music, to tell a bigger story of how we grew, how we came together as a country, all of us.
Right now, a special tribute honoring the victims of 9/11 lays before Kleinhan’s Music Hall. Each flag represents one of the thousands of lives lost. American Resilience honors all 9/11 heroes. The concert is a collaboration between the BPO, The American Red Cross, Western New York Chapter and Western New York families of 9/11.
John tells us all the proceeds are going toward the Western New York Families of 9/11 Memorial. In all we lost 29 Western New Yorkers. John Russell Morris hopes the concert will bring light to a dark time in history. He says it’s that feeling; the feeling that we were all together as one through this tragedy and we were going to get through it and that’s the feeling that we wanted to create for this concert. John says they have many great beloved patriotic classics, everything from America the Beautiful, God Bless America, The American Salute Fanfare for the Common Man of Aaron Copeland, but then we also wanted to have some pieces of music that have never been performed in Buffalo but are amazing pieces of music like The Fanfare for Democracy by Jim Stevenson that was composed for the Biden inauguration and we are going the be having the Western New York premiere of that piece and a couple of outstanding singers are going to be joining us, Dorothy Brown and Jessica Ann Bass both Western New Yorkers and the host is WKBW legend Keith Radford. He says Keith is such an inspiration and will be sharing words and narrations all the way throughout the program.
John says they wanted to find the music that would bring everyone together and says these are such challenging times for our country and the world and what we wanted to do was set that feeling, so that we could come back to it and use that as a positive to bring our country together, our community together to bring us all together for a greater good.
For more information and to get tickets go to BPO.org
