The North Carolina-based Durham Symphony Orchestra and Music Director William Henry Curry.
In Wednesday’s (2/5) Indy Week (Indianapolis), Tasso Hartzog writes, “In 2003, Maestro William Henry Curry was in the process of assembling a program for the Indianapolis Symphony. ‘A friend of a friend told me about a young African American musical genius who just finished an orchestral work,’ remembers Curry, now the music director for the Durham Symphony Orchestra. Curry looked at the composition, Herman Whitfield III’s Scherzo No. 2 in E Minor, and immediately sensed that he was in the presence of an ‘intriguing and extremely original talent.’… In 2022, the young composer died in police custody … while suffering from a mental health crisis. [His parents] had called for an ambulance but got law enforcement instead. Whitfield was unarmed. Whitfield’s story, a tragically familiar archetype in contemporary American life, is one of many that animates ‘Voices of the Unarmed: Justice, Love, Resilience,’ the Durham Symphony Orchestra’s Valentine’s Day program. The free concert—which will take place on February 14, in the middle of Black History Month—is anchored by three works: Whitfield’s own Overture-Fanfare in D Major, which will have its world premiere; Joel Thompson’s ‘Seven Last Words of the Unarmed,’ for orchestra and chorus; and Maestro Curry’s ‘Eulogy for a Dream.’… The Symphony has planned a series of community conversations … to explore the ideas raised by the concert.”
