Chineke! was founded in 2015 by Chi-chi Nwanoku (principal double bass in this performance) to provide career opportunities for established and emerging Black and ethnically diverse musicians in the UK and Europe. Chineke! Voices, who formed the choir at this concert, is its sister organisation. Players and singers are drawn together several times a year. That means that they don’t play together as a group all the time and sometimes you can feel that lack of the tight bonding you get in an orchestra which works together continuously.
The main work in this concert was Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony – with very large orchestral forces and a huge choir reaching almost to the beginning of the Royal Albert Hall’s dome. This was old fashioned Beethoven, reminiscent of the recordings I grew up with and light years away form the likes of Eliot Gardiner, Harnoncourt and Norrington. Kevin John Edusei, a measured conductor with a clear down beat and plenty of smiles, took all four movements more slowly than some of his contemporaries and it became almost majestic in places. I don’t mind hearing it like this sometimes because even if there’s occasional raggedness we’re allowed to relish the detail – such as more prominent timp than usual in the opening movement and some very incisive cello and bass pizzicato as we work though all that anxious, anticipatory D minor.
The second movement is almost a timp concerto and Jauvon Gilliam positioned high on the tiers did a fine, incisive job duetting with nicely judged woodwind passages. The soloists arrived quite dramatically on stage before the third movement in which the strings produced an attractive cantabile sound.
The star of the famous finale was definitely bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green who has one of those powerful, chocolate-rich voices which makes you sit up and listen extra hard from his very first note – a magnificent performance and some colourful quartet work with tenor Zwakele Tshabalala, mezzo Raehann Bryce-Davis and soprano Nicole Cabell.
The choir sang with plenty of attack but there were several spots in which sopranos and altos slipped out of synch with the orchestra. I have sung this work in this space (a massed Kent event with the Kent County Youth Orchestra some years ago) and understand how tricky it is if you seat women on one side of the organ and men on the other because they struggle to hear each other and everyone is a very long way from the conductor which means a time lag. So I sympathise. Each time it happened Edusei got it back on track very quickly but maybe a bit more rehearsal would have prevented these small lapses.
Nonetheless it was an exciting performance, reinforced by the whole raison d’etre of Chineke! and the audience went pretty wild at the end.
The evening had started with Lilacs, a 15 minute work by George Walker. It premiered in 1995 and it won Walker the Pullitzer Prize the following year – the first composer of Black American descent to achieve this award. It’s a song cycle comprising settings of four separate verses of an elegy by Walt Whitman written to honour Abraham Lincoln after the latter’s assassination. The orchestra tackled the tricky score competently enough and Nicole Cabell sang with vibrant passion although the words weren’t audible. The best bit was flute and percussion evoking the sound of the “gray-brown bird.”
Susan Elkin