Saturday, January 29, 2022

TheGuardian.com: The African Concert Series review – wild and shimmering piano gems

‘A quest to discover and perform’: Rebeca Omordia at the October Gallery. 
Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer



Sat 29 Jan 2022 07.30 EST

October Gallery, London
Rebeca Omordia launches this year’s series with a fascinating recital of music from Nigeria, Ghana, Morocco and South Africa

African art music – a bridge between western classical forms and traditional melody and rhythm – has a determined champion in the Romanian-Nigerian pianist Rebeca Omordia. She has made her life’s work a quest to discover and perform the output of composers – often unpublished – from right across that great continent. Judging by her inaugural recital in this year’s African Concert Series, her determination is yielding fascinating results.

Imagine, if you can, a sensuous, serpentine Arabic melody in the left hand winding its way up towards a delicate filigree of sparkling stars in the right hand and you have something of the impression that Moroccan composer Nabil Benabdeljalil (b.1972) creates in his beautiful Nocturne No 4 from 2015. His romantic Nocturne No 6 from 2020, which expresses his intense joy at roaming the Middle Atlas mountains after lockdown, feels as though John Field himself might have been a ghostly presence at his side.

Christian Onyeji (b.1967) seeks to transfer Nigerian drumming techniques to the piano in his Ufie, Igbo Dance, which becomes a wild celebration of intense rhythm, captured dramatically by Omordia.

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