Chineke! reopen the Queen Elizabeth Hall
(Mark Allan)
Sergio A. Mims forwards this 5-star review of a Chineke! concert at Queen Elizabeth Hall:
Michael Church
Tuesday 10 April 2018
The final concert before the hall’s closure had been given
by a Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) orchestra named Chineke!, giving
its first-ever public performance. Who better, therefore, to reopen the
hall than that same orchestra three years on, with its doughty founder
Chi-Chi Nwanoku still leading the double basses? Under the direction of
Anthony Parnther, they too have subjected themselves to refurbishment:
technically they have come on by leaps and bounds.
First they played a youthful work by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
– England’s first BME composer –entitled Ballade in A minor for
Orchestra, whose debts to Dvorak and Elgar didn’t obscure its freshness;
then came Dream Song, a new work by Daniel Kidane with a setting of
Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech.
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