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This concert was to have been conducted by Simon Rattle – a mark of the esteem in which leading artists hold Chineke! Orchestra, the trailblazing British ensemble made up of a majority of Black and ethnically diverse musicians. In the event, Charleston-born Jonathon Heyward put his own indelible stamp on a varied yet satisfying program.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s La Bamboula, a kaleidoscopic dance with roots in the West Indies, played to Chineke!’s strengths. The performed it with vigour and spirit, while Heyward kept its likable blend of late-Victorian tunefulness and proto-Hollywood glitz gossamer-light. You could see why Henry Wood programmed it at the Proms 16 times, making its subsequent 91-year absence inexplicable.
Brass and percussion took centre stage for Valerie Coleman’s Fanfare for Uncommon Times, a determined call to action written during the pandemic and in the wake of the death of George Floyd. Baleful horns, steely trumpets and a great wodge of trombones and tuba – the last of these standouts throughout – introduced pealing fanfares and a toe-tapping stomp glinting with vibraphone and xylophone.
Heyward himself programmed James Lee III’s Visions of Cahokia, a multihued triptych conjuring images of an ancient Native American settlement near modern-day St Louis. Sleigh bells and drumbeats lent momentum to all three movements, from the rhythmic arrival of the tribes in Cahokia’s Dream to the concluding Chukoskomo – a Chickasaw word meaning game or frolic. Peppered with a dash of Stravinsky, Lee’s vivid, pictorial music combined directness with complexity, all of which Chineke! seized upon with relish.
The evening ended with Shostakovich’s caustic yet colourful 10th Symphony. Heyward’s adroit reading was full of subtle shadows, from the deftly crafted ruminative opening to the tensile third movement, in which encoded motifs associated with the composer and his extramarital muse intertwined in ominous waltz time.
Chineke! responded with discipline and energy, impressively detailed in the fast and furious second movement in which viciously clipped phrasing paints an especially scabrous portrait of Stalin. Not every instrumental solo was as characterful as it might have been but there was no doubting their commitment as they plunged headlong into the troubled waters of the finale, emerging victorious for a final enigmatic flourish.
