Chineke! Orchestra welcomes audiences back to Southbank Centre
Chineke! Orchestra returns on 28th May as the first live audience event of Southbank Centre’s classical music programme.
As an Associate Orchestra of Southbank Centre, Chineke! has been chosen to open the venue’s Summer Reunion series, marking the return of audiences to UK concert halls since the onset of the pandemic crisis in 2020.
A limited number of 750 tickets will be made available to comply with social distancing rules within Royal Festival Hall, which usually seats 2,700 at full capacity.
Chineke! Orchestra gave its last pre-lockdown concert with a live audience in February 2020 at Queen Elizabeth Hall, and has since recorded three concerts behind closed doors to stream to virtual audiences.
Chineke! will celebrate the return to Southbank Centre with star soloist and musician of the moment Sheku Kanneh-Mason, who performs the timeless Dvorak Cello Concerto in B minor. An alumnus of the Chineke! Orchestra, this will be Sheku's first performance with Chineke! at the Royal Festival Hall since 2016, following his BBC Young Musician breakthrough.
The concert, entitled Fate Now Conquers, will feature the UK premiere of Carlos Simon’s piece of the same name, a tribute to Beethoven.
For the second time since its streamed world premiere at Royal Festival Hall in October 2020, Chineke! will perform REMNANTS, a work inspired by the image of Patrick Hutchinson carrying a white counter-protester to safety during the Black Lives Matter protests in London last year. The image captured outside the Southbank Centre by Reuters photographer Dylan Martinez came to epitomise the summer of racial tension and unrest. The subsequent poem written by Yomi Sode (set to music by James B. Wilson) delves deeper into its symbolism: the perception of Black men and the impact of systemic racism on the Black community.
The programme ends with one of the orchestra’s signature pieces - the Othello Suite by Black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.
The concert was made possible thanks to support through the government’s Culture Recovery Fund. Chineke! Foundation was awarded £150,000 in the second round of grants distributed.
Chineke!’s Founder and Artistic & Executive Director Chi-chi Nwanoku OBE said:
Following a year of disruption and loss caused by the pandemic and exacerbated by the racial injustices we have witnessed, it is a cathartic moment to reunite and reconnect audience and musicians, as we tentatively restart our lives.
Welcoming a live audience back into the hall will allow all of us to remove that final barrier so we can share the uplifting feeling that music brings as we share the same space together again. It is perhaps music’s greatest power.
It feels inevitable that this special programme includes our friend and Chineke! alumnus Sheku Kanneh-Mason, and more recent collaborators - Yomi Sode, James B. Wilson and Carlos Simon. We can’t wait to share this moment with everyone within the Royal Festival Hall.