EIF: Chineke! Chamber Ensemble
Queen’s Hall – 12/08/2022
Another glorious sunny day, and another extraordinary concert! The shooting fraternity proclaim the 12th of August as the Glorious Twelfth, the day when they can blast small fowl to pieces on Scottish hillsides. In the Queen’s Hall, we were treated to a splendid concert given by the elite chamber ensemble of the recently formed Chineke! Orchestra, founded to provide career opportunities for black and ethnically diverse classical musicians. I’m not sure about the ‘!’ in their name, but they are formidably good players, and seemed to be enjoying themselves immensely.
The first half was dedicated to music by black American and Aboriginal Australian musicians, and gosh, it was itself diverse! Ranging from a suite for piano, flute and string quartet to a full-scale piece for 10 players, didgeridoo and voice, the concert was vociferously applauded by a noticeably younger audience than usual for the morning concert at the Queen’s Hall.
First, we heard William Grant Still’s Folk Suite, a piece using folk rhythms and old melodies. His life spanned the first three quarters of the 20th century, and his success was due to his ability to match music of African origin with the style of European classical music. In particular, the second movement of this suite, entitled ‘Sometimes I feel like a motherless child’, was deeply moving and heartfelt, and beautifully played.
‘Red Clay and Mississippi Delta’ was a dynamic piece for wind ensemble by Valerie Coleman, exploiting the rich sounds of the woodwind instruments, and a French horn, with a terrific jazzy swing, played at full tilt by the excellent musicians.
Transporting us to the vast interior of Australia, Deborah Cheetham’s “Ngarrgooroon – Woven Song” was inspired by the language, culture and art of the First Nations people of that country. It evoked all sorts of images, a veritable tapestry of sound.
The final piece of the first half was the European premiere of William Barton’s ‘The Rising of Mother Country’, an ambitious composition featuring an ensemble of ten players, plus the extraordinary sound of the didgeridoo, and Mr Barton’s singing voice. The ensemble created a warm cocoon of sound to which William Barton added his own chanting voice as he made an entrance from back left, and soon we were enchanted by a myriad of different sounds and clicks and whistles through the medium of the didgeridoo, an instrument of which Mr Barton is a virtuoso. Combined with particularly evocative playing from horn and piano, this vast piece, with obvious influences from minimalist composers, was a knockout, and was greeted by an ovation rarely heard in the Queen’s Hall. An early piece by Mr Barton, this time on guitar, provided a jolly encore. I encourage all our readers to go to BBC Sounds to listen to this most unusual work.
In what seemed on paper a crazy leap, the second half was given over to Felix Mendelssohn’s youthful Piano Sextet in D Major, but it worked amazingly well, because we had already become acquainted with the splendid sound of the Chineke! Ensemble, and that sound produced a glorious account of this virtuosic piece, written in 1824 when the composer was only 15. We tend to think of Mendelssohn as a mid-nineteenth century composer, but this was written in the same year as Beethoven’s ‘Missa Solemnis’ and three years before ‘Winterreise!’ I must mention the fabulous piano playing of Beatrice Nicholas here, who, throughout the concert but particularly in the Sextet, played with a virtuosity and joie de vivre which was most impressive. Excellent too was the violin playing of Hannah White, and the sonority achieved by Mendelssohn with two violas in the ensemble was especially effective. The swagger of Mebrakh Haughton-Johnson on clarinet and the versatile playing of flute by Meera Maharaj stood out, but really all the ensemble were excellent.
An unlikely but most satisfyingly successful concert. Do listen again on BBC Sounds.
Cover Photo: Ryan Buchanan
