A review by Richard Morrison for The Times of London.
It was perhaps unkind of the Chineke! Orchestra to follow its premiere of Joan Armatrading’s First Symphony with Tchaikovsky’s Fifth, a work in which cracking good tunes are woven together with such ingenious showmanship that it would upstage almost anything in close proximity. Nevertheless, the comparison was instructive.
Armatrading has had a wonderful half-century career as a singer-songwriter who has crossed many stylistic boundaries. If, at 72, she wants to write orchestral music in the classical tradition we should stand and applaud her ambition and protean creativity at the very least. Which is exactly what a capacity audience did here. But it’s a big leap in musical thinking to go from the four-minute song form to a 30-minute symphony — and from expressing yourself in lyrics and with your own voice to managing without both. What she produced here was a patchwork of melodious, promising ideas (quite a few sounding like hymn tunes) that were often repeated again and again with varied backdrops but not really given much symphonic development.
So structurally it was a bit ramshackle, harmonically it was functional — mostly tonal melodies played by strings in octaves or thirds — and orchestrally it was competent but unambitious. But the real problem was that emotionally it didn’t say very much at all. Coming from a musician whose 20 albums of songs have subtly illuminated so many shades of emotion, that was disappointing.
There were two nice touches. In the first of the four movements I’m sure I heard a reference to We Shall Overcome — a nostalgic ditty for those of us old enough to remember the civil rights campaigns of the Sixties. And Armatrading finished the work with a single, rather dramatic double bass note, surely a tribute to Chineke!’s founder, the double bassist Chi-chi Nwanoku, who made this premiere possible.
The orchestra played it efficiently enough, but it was in the Tchaikovsky that its full passion was unleashed in a torrid if occasionally untidy performance conducted by admirable Andrew
Grams. Earlier a young assistant conductor, Adam Gibbs, had led a lively romp through the overture from the wonderful Duke Ellington/Billy Strayhorn riff on Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker ballet.
A review by Richard Morrison for The Times of London. It was perhaps unkind of the Chineke! Orchestra to follow its premiere of Joan Armatrading’s First Symphony with Tchaikovsky’s Fifth, a work in which cracking good tunes are woven together with such ingenious showmanship that it would upstage almost anything in close proximity. Nevertheless, the
