Chineke! Orchestra, Festival Hall, review: BLM-inspired premiere of which Beethoven would surely have approved

Even before the culture wars of 2020 got going, some had hoped to use Beethoven’s big anniversary as an excuse to knock him off his pedestal and give voice instead to under-represented composers. As it turned out, Covid-19 deprived him of many performances, so the bracingly taut Fifth Symphony heard at the end of this Chineke! Orchestra concert became something of a collector’s item for the few of us allowed into the Festival Hall and those hearing it via BBC Radio 3’s live broadcast.

But more importantly, as Europe’s first majority black, Asian and ethnically diverse orchestra, Chineke! managed to unite musical causes, and under the banner of Black Legacies its concert also featured two long-neglected composers enjoying fresh exposure and an emerging composer’s new work. Under the stylish baton of Kevin John Edusei, everything was played with musical transparency.

That lightness suited the African Suite op 35 of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, four movements originally written for piano in 1899 (the year after his popular cantata Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast). Most of Coleridge-Taylor’s music was forgotten after his death in Croydon aged only 37, but this performance showed its enduringly warm and lyrical qualities. With its generous, expansive melody, the love song of the second movement shows an affinity with the world of Dvořák, yet Coleridge-Taylor had a voice of his own.

One composer finally receiving her due is Florence Price, the first African American woman to have been recognised for her symphonies. Her Piano Concerto in One Movement (1934) sums up her style well. A pensive opening statement from the orchestra was met with imposing virtuosity by the 18-year-old soloist Jeneba Kanneh-Mason, making her Chineke! debut. Despite the work’s title, it comprises three compact movements in one, and the achingly lovely main motif of the first gives way to a serene centrepiece with bluesy hints. Even in the easy-going juba rhythms of the finale, the solo part requires delicacy, and Jeneba Kanneh-Mason – the fifth of the seven Kanneh-Mason musician siblings, also a cellist like her famous brother Sheku but now also following in the pianistic footsteps of her big sister Isata – supplied it.

Receiving its premiere, James B Wilson’s Remnants brought things up to date. Written with the Nigerian-British poet Yomi Sode in response to the seminal photograph of Patrick Hutchinson, recording that moment in a UK Black Lives Matter protest in June when a counter-protester was carried to safety, it opens with bristling tension before underpinning an impassioned speech-poem (declaimed by Sode himself) and fading into a compact threnody. As a pioneer of musical protest, Beethoven would surely have approved.

Hear this concert on the BBC Sounds app. See it streamed from Nov 23 on YouTube via chineke.org