RITA DI SANTO draws attention to a new film that features Ken Loach and Jeremy Corbyn, and their personal experience of media misrepresentation
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Chineke! Classical music for the many not the few!
Chineke!
[www.chineke.org/Zen Grisdale]
JULIA TOPPIN recommends Patti Smith’s eloquent memoir that wrestles with the beauty and sorrow of a lifetime
MARJORIE MAYO welcomes an account of family life after Oscar Wilde, a cathartic exercise, written by his grandson
KEN COCKBURN guides us through a survey of Chekov’s early short fiction, and the groundwork it laid for his later masterpieces
ANDY HEDGECOCK revels in a hugely enjoyable but deadly serious examination of the 1930s, that is an indictment of our own era
The bard distills our hellish times into fiery words
Chineke! Orchestra: Songs of the Prophets
Queen Elizabeth Hall
FOUNDED in 2015, the Chineke! Orchestra is Europe’s first majority black and ethnically diverse orchestra. Through its training outreach programme, the Chineke! Foundation, it is doing for classical music what the Tomorrow’s Warriors scheme has done for jazz, nurturing promising young talent through the use of accomplished and dedicated mentors – with staggering results.
Chineke! already has a history of taking on bold and innovative projects – such as unearthing previously neglected classics like 19th-century black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. So they were ideal candidates for performing Songs of the Prophets: A Requiem for the Climate.
Commissioned by Christian Aid, the piece comprises four movements by four different composers, on the themes of Creation, Ruin, Recovery and Redemption – each piece interspersed by solo improvisations on tabla, nyatiti and talking drum by master percussionists from Africa and Asia.
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