Chineke! Orchestra make musical history

Chineke! Orchestra, Europe’s first professional classical orchestras made up entirely of Global Ethnic Majority musicians, made their debut on our Queen Elizabeth Hall stage.

Chineke! – which means ‘the spirit of creation’ in Igbo – was the brainchild of the orchestra’s lead double-bassist Chi-chi Nwanoku, driven – as she told The Guardian at the time – by a want ‘to showcase the exceptional talent we have here in the UK and Europe among performers of ethnicity’.

The catalyst for Nwanoku’s idea – as she explained in that same piece for The Guardian – had come ten years earlier with a performance of the works of 18th century composer Joseph Chevalier de Saint-Georges whilst she was part of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. ‘His works included three operas, two symphonies, 15 violin concertos and more. And yet this was the first I’d ever heard of him! I was fascinated and also horrified that I’d never before asked myself whether there might have been someone like me in previous generations, previous centuries of classical musicians.’

Inspired by the Sphinx Organisation for Black and Latino musicians in the US, Nwanoku set out to create the orchestra that she would name Chineke!, and one of the first organisations she approached to help bring it to fruition was the Southbank Centre. And so on Sunday 13 September 2015 – or as Nwanoku puts it, ‘rather sooner than expected, but I love a challenge’ – 60 GEM musicians from the UK and Europe duly took to the stage at our Queen Elizabeth Hall as part of our Africa Utopia festival.

Under the baton of Wayne Marshall, Chineke! Orchestra took to the stage to rapturous applause for a concert that featured the works by Beethoven and Brahms, but also Philip Herbert’s ‘Elegy’, composed as a memorial to Stephen Lawrence and scored for 18 strings – one for each year of the murdered teenager’s life. And the memorable concert opened with this performance of ‘Ballade’ by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.