Symphony, guests take audience on ‘Africa’ journey

By Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll

Posted Jan 23, 2020 at 6:00 AM Updated Jan 24, 2020 at 6:41 AM

Program includes world premiere music played by an acclaimed cellist making his U.S. symphonic debut.

Once Jung-Ho Pak, Cape Symphony’s artistic director/conductor, followed up on a tip to watch South African cellist Abel Selaocoe on YouTube, he knew he wanted Selaocoe to “be the center, the germ, the nucleus of an African concert.”

The idea that began months ago comes to fruition this weekend in two symphony shows that not only mark the world premiere of a musical travelogue through eight African countries, but the American symphonic debut by a cellist that astonished Pak.

“I’ve never seen a cellist play with as much abandon, as much ferocity and as much joy since working with Yo Yo Ma,” he says.

And Selaocoe is only one part of a “Passport to Africa” program so varied that Pak, in a phone interview, calls it “one of the most exotic, adventurous and ambitious programs we’ve ever presented. ... There is a trust and a relationship with the (Cape) audience that they know that whatever I present, I’m going to do my very darndest to entertain them. ... It’s going to be something they’ve never seen before.”

On the weekend program: Ghanaian American pianist and scholar William Chapman Nyaho performing Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Africa,” based on North African folk music and a previously unannounced encore of “Wade in the Water”; John Barry music from Africa-set movies; “Africa: Land of Peace” by prominent African-American composer William Grant Still; and “African Kaddish,” a “joyous” piece that Bongani Ndodana-Breen wrote about a time of grieving in South Africa.