Chineke! Announces Summer Debuts

Chineke! Orchestra has announced their upcoming summer concerts!

Check out details below:

Chineke! Orchestra at Southbank Centre

On Saturday 10th July, Chineke! Orchestra presents its second Royal Festival Hall concert as part of Southbank Centre's Summer Reunion series. Conducted by Matthew Kofi Waldren, it features two symphonies by African-American composers and the debut of an exciting emerging pianist on the classical music scene.

19-year-old soloist Amiri Harewood takes centre stage for his first Southbank Centre and Chineke! Orchestra performance in the Grieg Piano Concerto. An alumnus of the Chineke! Junior Orchestra, Amiri currently studies at the Royal College of Music with Danny Driver.

William Grant Still and Florence B. Prince are two of America's most revered Black composers, and this concert celebrates their finest works. Grant Still's Afro-American Symphony draws on the influences of the jazz age and spirituals, while Price's Symphony no. 3 conveys the energy of a woman at the height of her creative powers.

A limited number of 1000 tickets are available to comply with social distancing rules within Royal Festival Hall, which usually seats 2,700 at full capacity. MORE

LIVE from London

The LIVE from London online festival launches on 4 July. Run by the VOCES8 Foundation, the festival brings together exceptional musicians for 14 concerts, among them VOCES8, The King's Singers, ORA Singers, the London Contemporary Orchestra and Robert Ames, a star quartet of Jack Liebeck, Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Julian Bliss and Katya Apekisheva, Mary Bevan and Zeb Soanes. The Chineke! Orchestra will form part of this line up for the first time since the festival began last year.

LIVE From London has been designed to raise money for festival artists and the Arts, and included in the ticket price is a donation to support the VOCES8 Foundation's international education, outreach, and diversity work. As the music industry recovers from the impact of the pandemic, it will be an important way to support artists and the music industry as a whole.

This online festival explores cycles of renewal and regeneration in nature and spirit. Chineke!'s concert includes Philip Herbert's contemplative Elegy: In memoriam - Stephen Lawrence, as well as performances of Ken Burton's pieces Descent to Earth and A Prayer. Both take their inspiration from the poems of emancipated slaves Paul Laurence Dunbar and Phyllis Wheatley, echoing with Spirituals, Gospel and Blues.

The festival will broadcast 14 concerts online beginning 4th July to 22nd August (with Chineke!'s performance released on 7 August). The whole festival will be available On-Demand until 31st August. MORE

Scottish Debut

Making its Scottish debut at this summer's Edinburgh International Festival, Chineke! will be resident over 2 days with a Chamber Ensemble performance on 16 August (MORE) and a chamber orchestra concert on 17 August (MORE). The latter includes Dame Judith Weir's woman.life.song, conducted by William Eddins and featuring mezzo soprano Andrea Baker.

In the same concert, Chineke! will present the world premiere of Ayanna Witter-Johnson's new work entitled Blush, described by the composer as "...inspired by the excitement and ups and downs of young love."

Return to the BBC Proms

Returning to this year's BBC Proms stage on 24 August, Chineke! Orchestra's programme will celebrate Black composers, led by Panamanian-American conductor Kalena Bovell. Currently with the Memphis Symphony, Bovell made her international conducting debut with the Chineke! Orchestra in November 2020 at Southbank Centre's Royal Festival Hall in the behind-closed-doors concert A Man Who Dreamed.

Also making her BBC Proms debut alongside Bovell is soloist Jeneba Kanneh-Mason, following in the footsteps of her brother Sheku who performed with Chineke! Orchestra in 2017. Jeneba will bring to life Florence B. Price's Piano Concerto in One Movement; this will be her second performance of this work with Chineke! following the live broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in October 2020.

Other programmed works include the joyous African Suite by the 'Father of Nigerian Art Music' Fela Sowande. In a tribute to Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Chineke! performs his Symphony no.1 in A Minor, as well as the Overture to Hiawatha's Wedding Feast - a work performed no less than 244 times at the Royal Albert Hall in its 1920s heyday, cementing Coleridge-Taylor's reputation as one of the finest young composers of his generation. MORE

Chineke!'s Founder and Artistic & Executive Director Chi-chi Nwanoku OBE said:

Our Southbank Centre reopening concert in May reminded us how much we musicians have missed the importance, vibrance and energy of playing to a live audience. It was an emotional reunion, giving us some semblance of 'normality' after a year of enforced separation, and I'm thrilled we will be able to invite more people to join our concerts over the summer months, both live and online.

It will be a season of 'firsts' for Chineke! as we debut in Scotland for the Edinburgh International Festival, premiere a new work by Ayanna Witter-Johnson, and present new talents on major stages - soloists Amiri Harewood and Jeneba Kanneh Mason, and American conductor Kalena Bovell. I hope the works we programme will encourage people to delve further into the lives of the composers that we bring to the fore, such as Fela Sowande, William Grant Still and Florence B. Price.

Of all the things ahead, I'm looking forward to performing the Overture to Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's Hiawatha's Wedding Feast in the Royal Albert Hall. He never lived long enough to witness the immense popularity of this piece in its time, and I hope our performance will be a kind of 'homecoming' for him.

For further information about Chineke! visit the website at chineke.org.

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