Beethoven would have approved of this
★★★★
Chineke! Orchestra Festival Hall, London SE1
Even before the culture wars of 2020 got going, some had hoped to use Beethoven’s big anniversary as an excuse to knock him off his pedestal and give voice instead to under-represented composers. As it turned out, Covid-19 deprived him of many performances, so the bracingly taut Fifth Symphony heard at the end of this powerful Chineke! Orchestra concert became something of a collector’s item for the few of us allowed into the Festival Hall.
But more importantly, as Europe’s first majority BAME orchestra, Chineke! managed to unite musical causes, and under the banner of Black Legacies its concert also featured two long-neglected composers enjoying fresh exposure and an emerging composer’s new work. Under the stylish baton of Kevin John Edusei, everything was played with musical transparency.
That lightness suited the African Suite op 35 of Samuel ColeridgeTaylor, four movements originally written for piano in 1899 (the year after his popular cantata Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast). Most of ColeridgeTaylor’s music was forgotten after his death in Croydon aged only 37, but this performance showed its enduringly warm and lyrical qualities. With its generous, expansive melody, the love song of the second movement
In this powerful concert, Chineke! managed to unite musical causes
shows an affinity with the world of Dvořák, yet Coleridge-taylor had a voice of his own.
One composer finally receiving her due is Florence Price, the first AfricanAmerican woman to have been recognised for her symphonies. Her Piano Concerto in One Movement (1934) sums up her style well. A pensive opening statement from the orchestra was met with imposing virtuosity by the 18-year-old soloist Jeneba KannehMason, making her Chineke! debut. Despite the work’s title, it comprises three compact movements in one, and the achingly lovely main motif of the first gives way to a serene centrepiece with bluesy hints. Even in the easygoing juba rhythms of the finale, the solo part requires delicacy, and Jeneba – the fourth of the seven Kanneh-mason musician siblings, a cellist like her famous brother Sheku but now also following in the pianistic footsteps of her big sister Isata – supplied it.
Receiving its premiere, James B Wilson’s Remnants brought things up to date. Written with the NigerianBritish poet Yomi Sode in response to the seminal photograph of Patrick Hutchinson, recording that moment in a UK Black Lives Matter protest in June when a counter-protester was carried to safety, it opens with bristling tension before underpinning an impassioned speech-poem (declaimed by Sode) and fading into a compact threnody. As a pioneer of musical protest, Beethoven would surely have approved.
Hear this concert on the BBC Sounds app. See it streamed from Nov 23 on Youtube via chineke.org