Music strikes the right note at the start of a new era
Chineke! Queen Elizabeth Hall
‘Inclusivity” is the unofficial mantra of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, which along with the Purcell Room, reopened on Monday after a muchneeded, nearly three-year refit. Before it closed, the venue had felt architecturally shut off from the world. Now Fcbstudios have provided a welcoming new glass frontage on to the river. Inside, the dominant impression is of more wood over the original concrete, and a new sense of lofty spaciousness. In a successful marriage between past and present, the brutalist heritage of the building feels celebrated and dematerialised all at once.
As for the opening event, what could declare “inclusivity” better than Chineke!, Europe’s first BME majority orchestra? The programme was cleverly chosen to pick up on the evening’s themes. There was the Ballade in A minor, composed in 1898 by Britain’s first BME composer of genius, Samuel Coleridge-taylor, and Benjamin Britten’s The Building of the House overture, composed in 1967 for the opening of Snape Maltings concert hall: Britten also conducted the opening performance at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in the same year. Both were played with tremendous verve and fine attention to detail under visiting American conductor Anthony Parnther. And there was a new setting composed by Daniel Kidane for Martin Luther King’s speech I Have a Dream to mark the 50th anniversary of his funeral.
It is to Kidane’s credit that Dream Song didn’t provide a facile mood of celebration. Instead the words, sung with powerful conviction by Roderick Williams and echoed by the Chineke! choir, seemed trapped in a realm of dreamlike oppression, the tense string lines shot through with threatening brass. But it felt more like an enigmatic sketch than a fully realised piece.
Under Parnther’s unfussy, relaxed baton, Beethoven’s gloriously sunny 4th Symphony unfolded with unforced grace. The orchestra was on terrific form, but the numerous woodwind solos shone out with special eloquence. Openings and reopenings tend to be grand and formal affairs; this one felt more like a party. Let’s hope it’s a sign of things to come.