The New York Times: Wayne Marshall conducting the Chineke ensemble during its debut performance in London in September 2015.
Chi-chi Nwanoku
For Chi-chi Nwanoku, coming up with the right name for her new minority orchestra was a stressful experience.
Though
Ms. Nwanoku had quickly formed a board of directors and had already
selected most of her players — 62 musicians representing 31 different
nationalities — she was constantly reminded that it would be hard to
promote their first concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall at the Southbank
Center here in September 2015 or to even set up a website without a
name.
She
knew she did not want it to be the Such-and-Such Philharmonic or the
Something Symphony, and the recent trend for orchestras to take Latin or
Greek names also did not inspire her. But the night before one of her
board meetings, the name came to Ms. Nwanoku, a double bass player who
grew up in Britain, where she was classically trained.
“I
literally sat bolt upright in my bed at 4 a.m. and I just shouted
‘Chineke!’ ” she said, referring to a word from the Nigerian Igbo tribe,
which was her father’s clan. “In Chinua Achebe’s book ‘Things Fall
Apart,’ you see the word ‘Chineke’ every now and then, with people
exclaiming it when something amazing happens. It means ‘wonderful’ or
‘wow.’ ”
The next day, when the board members asked her the inevitable question about a name, Ms. Nwanoku told them and explained the meaning behind it. The board loved the idea.
“My
dad would be smiling that this Igbo word is being said by everybody,”
said Ms. Nwanoku, who has Irish ancestry on her maternal side. “And it
means something so positive.”
Since that first concert, the Chineke! Foundation
— which includes both Europe’s first professional orchestra made up
entirely of minority musicians from across Britain and Europe, and also a
junior orchestra — has had a strong impact not only on the musicians
involved, but also on the audiences.
The
first concert in 2015 during the Africa Utopia festival sold out, and
fans lined up outside the concert hall hoping to get in. The performance
last year, held at the Southbank’s larger Royal Festival Hall, which
seats over 2,000, was also hugely popular.
This
year the orchestra has a number of performances, including a concert
this past Sunday, St. George’s Day, at St. George’s Bristol, a former
church turned concert space. In May, some members who have performed
with the Sphinx Organization, a
nonprofit based in Detroit that is dedicated to the development of
black and Latino classical musicians, will appear in a musical showcase
in the Netherlands.
“Chi-chi
is a force of nature, and what she has been able to do in a short
period of time, it has been fantastic,” said Afa S. Dworkin, the
president and artistic director of Sphinx. “The response has been
undeniably positive throughout the musical community.”
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