Chineke! review: Fawzi Haimor conducts an exhilarating, game-changing ensemble

Impressive: Tai Murray was a soloist in the celebrated Max Bruch concerto
Gaby Merz
Barry Millington9 June 2020

Last November Chineke! was honoured with the Royal Philharmonic Society’s first gamechanger award and although there’s always an atmosphere of anticipation at their concerts, this one did seem to have a special tingle factor.

Perhaps it was not a coincidence that Beethoven’s uplifting Seventh Symphony, which was on the programme of the orchestra’s inaugural concert in 2015, was also on this one. That concert, too, was led by the violinist Tai Murray, welcomed back here as soloist in the celebrated Max Bruch concerto.

As well as affording opportunities to talented BAME musicians, Chineke! promotes repertoire by marginalised composers such as Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, dubbed “the Black Mahler” when he conducted American orchestras in the early Nineties. His Othello Suite, comprising music written for Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s 1911 production of the Shakespeare play at His Majesty’s Theatre, is perhaps not quite the masterpiece claimed but is enjoyable and worth the occasional outing.

At times, especially in the closing Military March, it is redolent of both Eric Coates in his tuneful quickstep mode and Erich Wolfgang Korngold as purveyor of technicolour film scores. In both this and the Bruch, Fawzi Haimor’s elegant gestures with arms and baton encouraged warm, sweeping phrasing.

Murray was similarly alert to the lyrical potential of the Bruch and brought a strongly individual sensibility to the work. Her technical facility is impressive but a more confident attack might have given the extra bit of propulsion needed.

The voicing of woodwind and strings was at its best in the Beethoven. Careful preparation ensured that Haimor got exactly what he wanted from the musicians, including a somewhat eccentric upwards whoosh in the much-repeated phrase of the scherzo trio.

In the finale, though, upbeats generated urgency, delivering a bracing conclusion to an exhilarating concert by this, yes, game-changing ensemble.

The best opera and classical to see in 2020

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