Tag Archives: Chineke! Orchestra

EIF: Chineke! Chamber Players

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Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

The Chineke! Orchestra has made a profound and lasting impression on the classical music world, with its commitment to ethnic diversity among its players and the composers it performs. It’s not a strangulating, exclusive deal – look at the wide multi-cultural spread among its ranks – but it’s a prominent one. Classical music, and society, are all the better for it.

We experienced that in miniature on Thursday, when the Chineke! Chamber Players took to the Queen’s Hall stage for a programme that delved into music by composers much of the audience are unlikely to have heard of – Black Americans William Grant Still (1895-1978) and 52-year-old Valerie Coleman, and contemporary native Australian artists Deborah Cheetham and William Barton – as well as Mendelssohn, his posthumously-published Piano Sextet Op110.

That’s all very well, but at the end of the day if a piece of music is merely fair-to-middling it’s not going to set the heather on fire, and the first half of this concert certainly left this listener unconvinced we’d heard anything particularly exceptional. Many of the performances, a range of ensemble mixes culminating in Barton’s frontline appearance on didgeridoo, struggled to make proverbial silk purses.

Still’s Folk Suite No 1 undoubtedly bears a popular charm, its references to African folk song, Black spiritual and high-spirited Jewish songs very much a starter for ten, with a catchy opening movement simplistically reminiscent of Arthur Jacob’s Jamaican Rumba. Coleman, a more expansive compositional voice in her early 50s, aims to interpret life in the American South through the medium of the classical scherzo, which Red Clay and  Mississippi Delta did in a performance that played to its bluesy tenor, got us finger-clicking (though with no indication of when to stop) and a virtuosity that took time to emotionally engage and ultimately fly. 

For the remaining Australian portion of the opening half, the mood turned distinctively pictorial, first in the filmic soundscaping that is Cheetham’s Ngarrgooroon – Woven Song. Cheetham – one of the country’s Stolen Generation which saw Aboriginal children forcibly removed for their biological families to live with non-Aboriginals – is a multi-disciplined performer and activist whose compositions encompass her beliefs in “country and connection”. While this one oozes atmosphere and mysticism, it struggles to go places musically.

The same might be said for Barton’s The Rising of Mother Country, which started off so promisingly with the composer entering from the rear and processing through the audience soulfully incanting. Once seated within the ensemble, didgeridoos at the ready (he had two, one exquisitely ornate, the other looking as if it had been through the wars and held together with gaffer tape), his role seemed disappointingly incidental. Was it that the didgeridoo is intrinsically subtler than I thought, or was the amplification inefficient? Either way, what looked like an intensity of expression was hard to actually perceive above the fullness of the surrounding ensemble. 

Despite that, the overall effect was at times mesmerising, evocatively nostalgic, if ultimately lacking in shape and directional definition. Barton continued with a further number, a song inspired by his early love of rock (I think he referenced Australian rock band AC/DC) in which he simultaneously sang, played guitar and didgeridoo. He was a natural star in this.

Safe to say that the second half, limited to one substantial work, inspired the now piano and string ensemble to a more palpable and profound belief in what they were playing. This was the Mendelssohn’s Sextet, a work that makes no apologies for its technical demands on the pianist from start to finish, but which explores exhaustive possibilities among the entirety of this rich instrumental grouping. 

As a whole, Chineke! delivered an invigorating performance, with gritty, witty interplay and capturing the high drama in music that betrays the composer’s odd flamboyant nod to Weber. It almost hit the skids in the final moments, but ultimately this Mendelssohn gem was the much-needed panacea to a strangely undistinguished first half. True quality wins out.

Ken Walton

Image: Chineke! Chamber Players & Wiliam Barton by Ryan Buchanan

EIF: Chineke! Orchestra

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Old College Quad & Edinburgh Academy Junior School

Scheduled to appear at the Queen’s Hall during last year’s cancelled Festival, the chamber group drawn from the Chineke! Orchestra brought a shorter programme to the Old College Quad, and it did Ralph Vaughan Williams few favours. He disowned his early Piano Quintet in C minor and it is undoubtedly less played now than the Nonet by a teenage Samuel Coleridge-Taylor of a decade earlier, which has been championed by Chineke! and recently played by members of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and pianist Tom Poster’s Kaleidoscope Collective.

Even without some poor balance in the sound mix for the quintet, it would have suffered from the comparison, the nonet having better tunes, and more sparkling rhythms. It was also clear that a few of those on the stage have a real passion for the piece, with some great playing from the winds, which included Sasha Rattle, son of conductor Sir Simon, on clarinet.

The 2021 Festival programme also brought a visit by the Chineke! Orchestra itself, although it was a very small version of it, with only double the number of players seen in the ensemble. The concert it played, under conductor William Eddins, who has a longer association with EIF, was still something of an occasion. Both works were premieres – one brand new and the other, I think, for Scotland and by Scot Judith Weir – and the composers were in the audience to acknowledge the applause.

Ayanna Witter-Johnson’s Blush, commissioned by Chineke! to accompany Weir’s woman.life.song, might almost have been marking the recent 50th anniversary of the score to the film Shaft. There were not only hints of movie score about it, but also the flavour of orchestration of the early 1970s jazz orchestras who played them. The composer made full use of a three-piece Latin rhythm section and the ensemble’s flautist had most of the lead lines.

The group expanded only slightly for the song-cycle Jessye Norman commissioned from Weir and writers Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison and Clarissa Pinkola Estes. It is not unfair to acknowledge that mezzo Andrea Baker does not have the magisterial presence of Norman, and the shifts of tone and style over the sequence make considerable demands.

Angelou’s thoughts On Youth and On Maturity frame the work and the finest poetry comes in the middle, from Toni Morrison, and is set to the most distinctive of Weir’s music. Pinkola Estes supplies the early light relief with Breasts!, the words of an “innocent wild-child” anxious to grow, set to something akin to a show-tune, with jazzy acoustic guitar, and then the later devotional texts on motherhood, its vexations rather than consolations, and the pain of losing the one who brought you into the world.

There are no passengers onstage with Weir’s score, which constantly surprises, and Baker has a lot of power at her disposal even if her singing sometimes lacked the nuance the work demands. The slightly random points at which the audience chose to clap also suggested the overall shape of the work was less apparent than it might have been. For all that, I’d still be keen to hear it again.

Keith Bruce

Celebrating diversity in classical music

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The founder of Chineke! Orchestra, Chi-chi Nwanoku, speaks to Keith Bruce ahead of its Edinburgh Festival debut.

It is easy to put a kilt on the story of the Chineke! Orchestra, the ensemble of black and ethnically diverse musicians that is “championing change and celebrating diversity in classical music”.

The orchestra was conceived in the catalytic presence of Glaswegian Gillian Moore, Director of Music at London’s Southbank, as founder Chi-chi Nwanoku relates in the well-rehearsed tale of her “lightbulb moment”.

The board of the organisation includes the former chief executive of the RSNO, Krishna Thiagarajan, and one of its most recognisable regular musicians, and social media advocates, is RSNO timpanist Paul Philbert. When it made its live re-appearance at the Royal Festival Hall at the end of May, Jane Atkins of the Scottish Ensemble was leading the violas and RSNO cor anglais Henry Clay was principal oboe. The Munich-based conductor Kevin John Edusei, who has impressed with the BBC SSO, the SCO and the RSNO in recent years, came to UK attention via his Chineke! appearances on the podium.

Now the orchestra, and its associated Chamber Ensemble, will make their Edinburgh Festival debuts, in concerts that include music by Judith Weir, and with mezzo Andrea Baker, who is now based in Scotland, as soloist.

But back to that “lightbulb moment”. Nwanoku had a 30-year career as an orchestral double bassist, notably with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, when she began to be invited to sit on the boards of organisations like the Association of British Orchestras and the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain.

“That was where I heard the word ‘diversity’ being used around the table,” she says. “It wasn’t something I’d heard being discussed in the orchestra, but then Ed Vaizey, the culture minister at the time, asked me why he only ever saw me as a person of colour on the concert hall stage.

“And I was often the only person of colour, not just on stage but in the entire auditorium. And that included the composers of the music we played, and the management and the backstage staff.”

Around the same time, Nwanoku attended a Southbank concert by the Kinshasa Symphony Orchestra of the Congo and was struck by the absence of black British musicians in the filming of a documentary about the visiting Africans. There was obviously a job of work to be done to raise the profile of players like herself.

“On the Monday I phoned every musical institution and told people what I was going to do. I began contacting all the principals of all the music academies and asking about their alumni. I wrote to soloist friends asking if they had noticed other musicians of colour in the orchestras they’d played with.

“Don’t assume I’ll know them!” I said. “One person would lead me to another, and we began putting a junior orchestra together as well. Exactly a year later that Junior Orchestra performed in the afternoon in the Clore Ballroom in the Royal Festival Hall and you couldn’t move for the number of people who came to hear them. Two hours later the Chineke! Orchestra, the professional orchestra, walked out on the Queen Elizabeth Hall platform to a sold-out audience.”

That was in 2015, and the profile of Chineke! has been growing impressively in the years since. Already an MBE, Nwanoku was awarded the OBE in 2017, the year the Chineke! Orchestra made its debut at the BBC Proms. In 2019 the Royal Philharmonic Society introduced a new category to its prestigious awards, Game-Changer, and Chineke! was the first recipient. In the citation, the Wigmore Hall’s John Gilhooley said: “Chineke! came from nowhere, and it is now almost impossible to imagine a world without it.”

“The energy and the mixture of people on the stage directly affects who is in the audience,” says Nwanoku. “Chineke! is not just for black and ethnically-diverse people, it is for the industry to benefit. Any initiative that is inclusive produces results, across any business and all walks of life.

“Classical music looked like the last bastion where ethnically-diverse people were excluded. When we did our first Prom in 2017, the television broadcast was the most viewed in Prom history. Of the 75 people on the stage that night, seven were white, and 95 per cent of them had never set foot on that platform before.

“In the pre-pandemic days when we could share music stands, there were never two people from the same background sharing a stand in the Chineke! Orchestra. I love that.”

There’s another plaid swatch in the kilted version of the Chineke! story in the pre-Festival life of EIF Head of Music Andrew Moore. He can be glimpsed in a documentary about a pre-Chineke! Chi-chi Nwanoku, being given a double bass lesson at her London home. Some years later he has booked her orchestra to visit Edinburgh for what will be its Scottish debut.

“I think EIF were waiting to see how we were going to do, as a lot of people did. They did want to see that we were worth our salt. But we are pushing against open doors now.”

Significantly, the Festival invitation came with proposals as to the programme the orchestra would play, and with whom. Moore not only suggested the major work in the concert but also its conductor, and soloist. Judith Weir’s woman.life.song was written for Jessye Norman and sets words by Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and Clarissa Pinkola Estes. It premiered at New York’s Carnegie Hall in 2000, and was reprised by Norman at the London Proms the same year.

“EIF suggested that piece to us,” says Nwanoku. “It’s the first time a Festival or venue has suggested what we play, but I’ve loved the music of Judith Weir since I played a piece by her with the BBC Singers and just the double bass.”

It is, however, Chineke! philosophy to play a work by a composer of relative ethnicity in every programme, so the orchestra has commissioned Ayanna Witter-Johnson to write a short new work to precede the Weir.

“She’s a really talented black British composer. We recently premiered a piece at St Paul’s Cathedral that was a sort of requiem for the climate and she wrote the first movement, the Creation.”

Afro-American conductor William Eddins, conductor emeritus of Canada’s Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, where he was music director from 2005 to 2017, is also new to Chineke!.

“It is a great opportunity to meet another conductor, says Nwanoku. Our conductors are as much a part of our musical success as the orchestra.”

As Chineke!’s founder explains, it has been very important “optically and politically” that an ethnically diverse orchestra was not being directed from the podium by a white man. That said, there are advanced plans for a very well-known conductor who fits that description to work with the orchestra on a major work that was scheduled for last year’s cancelled Proms. The huge orchestral and choral forces required mean it is still postponed and Nwanoku has her fingers crossed for 2022.

This year the orchestra is returning to the Royal Albert Hall, on August 24, and will be working with its first woman conductor, Kalena Bovell, who is also American and conducted Chineke! in November. The programme includes composers Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Florence Price, with Jeneba Kanneh-Mason playing the latter’s Piano Concerto in One Movement.

As part of Edinburgh International Festival 2021, Chineke! Chamber Ensemble is at Old College Quad on August 16 playing Vaughan Williams and Coleridge Taylor. William Eddins conducts Chineke! Orchestra at Edinburgh Academy Junior School on August 17. 
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