United Kingdom Alberga, A Coleridge-Taylor, Coleman, Price: Meera Maharaj (flute), Myfanwy Price (oboe), Stephanie Yim (clarinet), Daria Phillips (bassoon), Nivanthi Karunaratne (horn), Chineke! Orchestra / Tatiana Pėrez (conductor). Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, 9.10.2024. (CK)
Eleanor Alberga – Overture, Jupiter’s Fairground
Avril Coleridge-Taylor – Sussex Landscape
Valerie Coleman – Phenomenal Women: Concerto for wind quintet & chamber orchestra
Florence Price – Symphony No.4 in D minor
It is Black History Month, and Chi-chi Nwanoku and Chineke! have come up with a typically enterprising programme: four works, all of them composed by black women – two British, two American – only one of which (Coleridge-Taylor’s Sussex Landscape) has been recorded. As we have come to expect from this band, all four pieces were given sparkling performances – and then some.
British-Caribbean composer Eleanor Alberga’s Jupiter’s Fairground ostensibly depicts the mythological top god looking down on his dominions with pride and amusement: but despite the importance of mythology in Alberga’s work we do not really need to know that – we are better just enjoying the many-coloured vigour and bounce of the music. Upbeat and urban in a Michael Torke sort of way, turning voluptuous with lovely woodwind chording over a double bass pedal, an athletic oboe solo like birdsong, woodwind cavorting again over chanting lower strings, bubbling horns and muted trumpets, a final nod to The Rite of Spring…it’s clear that Alberga enjoys beautiful sounds and rhythms: it sounds soppy, but I spent the ten minutes the piece lasts smiling and thinking, what a wonderful thing the classical orchestra is, and isn’t it great that people are still writing such music for it!
Having enjoyed Chineke!’s performance of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Symphony back in February, I was looking forward to hearing music by his daughter – who lived into her mid-nineties (her more famous father did not make forty). Tutored by Sir Henry Wood, she was better known as a conductor than as a composer: but Sussex Landscape reveals a sure hand and an eloquent voice – not least in conveying the tension between pastoral calm and rumours of war (it was written in 1939). At its heart is a ruminative cor anglais, joined by other woodwind; strings and harp weave a bucolic spell which reaches a glowing and unashamedly Romantic climax. Returning tensions restore the dark mood and drive the music to its sombre close – too briefly, perhaps, since the ending seemed to take us all by surprise.
Next door, in and around the Royal Festival Hall, the opening Gala of the British Film Festival was getting under way, but the entry of the five soloists for Valerie Coleman’s Phenomenal Women put all that in the shade: they could have strutted the red carpet outside the RFH, instruments and all. Five of the work’s six movements celebrate iconic and groundbreaking American women: Maya Angelou was up first, the five soloists playing as an ensemble, the music glowing, the mood funky and calypso-like with a subtle backing on woodblock and tapped cymbal. Myfanwy Price’s oboe took centre stage for Katherine Johnson, beginning with a stuttering two-note Morse code spelling out Hidden Figures – the film chronicling Johnson’s trials and her crucial role at NASA in the 1950’s. Price’s oboe, with its wide leaps and its complex virtuosity, depicted the brilliance of an agile mind and the tensions that work on space exploration inevitably engenders. Serena Williams also began with an aural pun, the woodblock recreating her bouncing of the ball before serving. As with the other women, though, Coleman is primarily honouring Williams’s good works, the ways in which she has improved people’s lives: Daria Phillips’s superb bassoon was the soloist here, in a show-stopping enactment of Williams’s agility, strength and grace.
Here, at the heart of the work, Coleman provides sobering context for her constellation of phenomenal women by inserting an extra movement – Caravana – in which the solo flute leads, depicting the agony of migrant women separated from their children. Meera Maharaj was both virtuosic and moving in her evocation of their feelings, from lonely keening to outbursts of anguish and distress, supported by long notes on lower strings, duetting poignantly at one point with solo horn; the sounds underpinned by quiet, ominous timpani. Next, Michelle Obama: music bold and beautiful, Nivanthi Karunaratne’s solo horn suggestive of suppleness and resilience; a feeling of confidence, determination and progress embodied in a march rhythm with a flick of the hip in it. Exhilarating.
The last movement celebrates Claressa Shields – a new name to me – double Olympic boxing champion and eco-warrior spearheading a campaign against the poisoning of her fellow-citizens by contaminated water. The woodblock was back, combining with pizzicato strings to suggest the drip of toxic chemicals into the Flint River. Stephanie Yim’s clarinet playing was extraordinary: athletic, rhythmically complex, bobbing and weaving (Floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee). The conclusion was triumphant, and wonderfully sassy: the whole work, around its sombre centrepiece, is a brilliant display of playfulness and of all kinds of strength and beauty, expressed in a kaleidoscope of orchestral invention and instrumental skill.
Florence Price’s Fourth Symphony is very similar in its groundplan and its instrumentation to her Third, which Chineke! performed in June last year. The first movement is the most substantial, based on the spiritual Wade in the Water (in religious terms presumably crossing the Jordan; but Chi-chi Nwanoku told us that it was practical advice to escapees – the dogs will not pick up your scent). Price’s treatment of it is powerfully effective in its minor-key mood of heroic struggle; a consolatory major steals in near the movement’s end.
The oboe solo that opens the Andante cantabile is too obvious a homage to Dvořák’s famous (Hovis) tune in the New World Symphony: so much so that we may not notice the movement’s effectiveness as salve after the rigours of the first, or the skill with which Price dresses the tune in a variety of orchestral colours (rather like Copland in Appalachian Spring). It did not bother me, but her critics will pounce on it. A single gong stroke troubles the pastoral calm.
The playful and energetic third movement (marked, as in the Third Symphony, Juba: Allegro) suggests ragtime, with a sultry and plaintive central episode for cor anglais: it again displays Price’s resourceful use of the orchestra. The finale – also conforming to the Third Symphony’s marking Scherzo: Allegro – begins in similarly light vein. Having found the Third Symphony’s finale its least successful movement, I feared I was in for a repeat: but it gained weight and propulsion through a busy, moto perpetuo-ish theme for strings, tricked us with a lugubrious bassoon solo, and generally wore an air of conviction lacking in its predecessor. I really like it: and Chineke!’s performance deserved its standing ovation. I have not mentioned the conductor, the Colombian Tatiana Pėrez: not so much an oversight, I hope, as a tribute to her unobtrusive skill in projecting the character of every piece, and to her clear and friendly rapport with Chineke!’s players.
Chris Kettle