Chineke! Orchestra shows off its new chorus in a rare Brazilian Requiem — review
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It would not be a concert by Chineke! without a first, and this one was packed with them: a new work getting its premiere, a choral work getting its first known performance in the UK, and the debut of Chineke! Chorus, marking another step forward in this ensemble’s ambitions.
Ever since Chi-chi Nwanoku launched Europe’s first majority Black and ethnically diverse orchestra, a large-scale choir has been an obvious omission. Typically, Chineke! Chorus’s debut at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall came in a rarity, the Requiem of José Maurício Nunes Garcia (1767-1830).
The Brazilian composer was commissioned to write it on the death of the Portuguese Queen in 1816, and the fascination of the work is how close it is to Mozart’s unfinished Requiem, his last work. We know that Mozart’s Requiem arrived in Brazil around the same time, but did Nunes Garcia hear it before or after composing his own? Either way, the similarities are striking and it was good to get acquainted with Nunes Garcia’s analogous version. There was a decent quartet of soloists, and the fledgling Chineke! Chorus took its first, sometimes unsteady steps forward.
The concert opened with the premiere of Stewart Goodyear’s Life, Life, Life in memory of his mother. This was an often uplifting piece in conductor Malcolm J Merriweather’s lively performance, at its best in the coruscating movement for winds, brass and percussion. In between, mezzo-soprano Idunnu Münch was the strong soloist in La mort de Cléopâtre, in which Berlioz’s innovative orchestral writing produced some wobbly playing. There have been concerts when Chineke! has raised its game, but this was not really one of them.
★★★☆☆
Coincidentally, the BBC Symphony Orchestra is scheduled to perform another of Nunes Garcia’s major works, his Missa de Santa Cecilia, at the Barbican on May 10. That is one item in a BBC season of typically stark contrasts, another coming last Sunday with a day devoted to four postwar Italian composers, dubbed “Italian Radicals”.
The years following the second world war saw politics become a dominant force in music. Some composers, especially in Germany and Italy, embraced leftwing idealism as part of a move to overturn the musical traditions of the prewar years, while even those who remained essentially conservative in their music, such as Shostakovich and Britten, were often motivated by political or social concerns.
The evening concert in this BBC Total Immersion day featured just one overtly political work in Luigi Nono’s Canti di vita e d’amore, which sets texts denouncing nuclear weapons and Franco’s fascist regime in Spain. Anna Dennis and John Findon were the two soloists meeting vocal challenges with grace and accuracy in the teeth of explosive denunciations from the orchestra.
The purely orchestral works could easily be heard without politics in mind at all. Luigi Dallapiccola’s Three Questions with Two Answers invoked delicate sonorities. Luciano Berio’s Sequenza 9c, brilliantly played by solo bass clarinet Thomas Lessels, and his Sinfonia, the most demonstrative orchestral score to come out of the Italian radicals, set themselves essentially musical goals in terms of exploring technique and discipline, or musical history.
The most immediately engaging was Bruno Maderna’s Oboe Concerto No 3, conjuring a kaleidoscope of flickering sounds against which soloist Nicholas Daniel created marvels of expression. Martyn Brabbins conducted performances of uncommon care and the orchestra was huge. One wonders: how will some of these big pieces have a future without the public subsidy of the 1950s to pay for them?
★★★★☆
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