Black Landscapes: Chineke! Orchestra & Nicolas Van Poucke at Royal Festival Hall
Nicolas van Poucke - photo by Maarten Kools
Chineke! Orchestra returns for its first streamed concert of the season!
Recorded at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, the orchestra will perform works by pioneering Black women composers and the concerto that marked Beethoven’s first steps towards Romanticism. We are delighted to be joined once more by American conductor Roderick Cox, who made his London debut with Chineke! at Royal Festival Hall in 2017.
Pianist, composer and conductor Avril Coleridge-Taylor followed in the footsteps of her father, the British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who died when she was just nine years old. In a career spanning the twentieth century, she wrote chamber works and several shorter pieces for full orchestra which include her tone poem Sussex Landscape, inspired by a place familiar to her and where she was to spend the final years of her life.
The C minor key of the Beethoven Piano Concerto no 3. reflects the turbulence of the composer’s life at the time of its writing, marking the onset of his hearing loss. He himself was the soloist at its premier in 1803 and for this performance, Dutch pianist Nicolas van Pouke takes centre stage in his Royal Festival Hall debut with Chineke!
Trailblazer Florence B. Price’s first Symphony won the Rodman Wanamaker Contest when it was submitted for consideration in 1932, paving the way for her to become the first female African-American composer to have work performed by a major orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. This piece references the melodies of traditional spirituals, as well as West African rhythms and the Romantic symphonic themes of Dvořák.
Read a review of the concert by Fiona Maddocks of The Observer.
Performers
Chineke! Orchestra
Roderick Cox, conductor
Nicolas van Poucke, piano
Repertoire
Avril Coleridge-Taylor Sussex Landscape Op 27 (12 mins)
Beethoven Piano Concerto No 3 in C minor (34 mins)
Florence B. Price Symphony No 1 in E minor (40 mins)
*This event will be streamed on the Chineke! Foundation’s YouTube channel for two weeks from 7.30pm on Monday 12 October 2020, and will be available to view for FREE during this time. Chineke! Foundation will allow donors to access the concert in full after the streaming period.
