Chineke! Riding high at the RFH [Royal Festival Hall]
Jessica Duchen
It's hard enough to put an ordinary orchestra together... so just
imagine the effort involved in assembling the magnificent crew that took
the stage at the Royal Festival Hall last night for the climax of the
Southbank's Africa Utopia festival.
Chineke! - the brainchild of double-bass suprema Chi-chi Nwanoku
- is Europe's first all-BME symphony orchestra and is designed a) to
celebrate the talent of its members and b) to show the rest of us that
not all faces on the concert platform need to be white or Far Eastern.
The atmosphere of the RFH's foyers, too, was transformed; warm, relaxed,
smiley people of every shape, size and colour were there, enjoying the
festive programming, foyer events and the food market outside, and the
hall itself was packed.
The Chineke! players come from all over the world. They range from young
students of the Purcell School and Birmingham Conservatoire to such
luminaries as leader Ann-Estelle Médouze, concertmaster of the Orchestre
Nationale de l'Ile de France, the lead trumpet of the Met in New York,
the violist of the Fine Arts Quartet, the stupendous flautist Eric Lamb,
British cellist and educator Desmond Neysmith, principal second violin
Samson Diamond who started with Buskaid in Soweto, and of course Chi-chi
herself. Charlotte Barbour-Condini, a BBC Young Musician finalist as a
recorder player, is here playing the violin.
Several members of the multitalented Kanneh-Mason family are aboard too,
including the current Young Musician of the Year, Sheku the cellist;
when he wasn't out front, making his RFH debut in the Haydn Cello
Concerto, he was back in the middle of the cello section, giving his
all.
Despite this disparate nature, even if the ensemble can't always be
perfect, there were moments of absolute magic where a section began to
play virtually as one instrument, notably the first violins. The
conductor, Kevin John Edusei, a young competition winner and now chief
conductor of the Münchner Symphoniker, offered clarity, swing and masses
of positive and unifying energy.
The evening got off to a flying start with Sibelius's Finlandia.
Odd choice? Not so: along came the chorus of Cape Town Opera, which has
been performing its Mandela Trilogy in the festival and, ranked up the
aisles, they transformed the big tune into a stirring anthem with nice,
up-to-the-minute, inclusive words. It would be easy to pick holes in
that idea (the cited flora sounded a tad Alpine) - but my goodness, I
was right in among them in an aisle seat, and my own background is South
African; my late parents left in the '50s and my father refused to go
back until Apartheid was brought down, and I thought of how much this
evening would have meant to them, and I cried.
Next, a transformation to the 18th century: the three-part Overture to
L'amant anonyme by
Joseph Boulogne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges:
expert violinist, fencer and favourite of Marie-Antoinette. It's a
piece of much charm and the Chineke strings, with Isata Kanneh-Mason at
the harpsichord, brought it lilt, warmth and bounce.
Chi-chi Nwanoku, MBE, is a Double Bassist who
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