Chineke!/ Heyward/ Angel Blue review – belated premiere for forgotten Black composer
A Chineke! Prom at the Royal Albert Hall gave the belated premiere of Ballet, a 1918 three-movement work by Edmund Thornton Jenkins, a Black composer from Charleston, South Carolina, who died in Paris aged 32. The performance formed part of the orchestra's ongoing effort to rediscover music by forgotten Black composers, reconstructed from incomplete manuscript parts by Jenkins's great-nephew Tuffus Zimbabwe and conducted by Jonathon Heyward, with the reviewer finding it a persuasive, if unevenly finished, discovery.
The concert also featured soprano Angel Blue, who brought gleaming tone and atmosphere to Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915, though her later rendition of four Great American Songbook standards relied more on charm than vocal polish. A planned song by Margaret Bonds was dropped from the programme without explanation. The evening closed with an energetic performance of Dvořák's Symphony No 8, praised for its momentum and the orchestra's brass section. The concert is available on BBC Sounds until 12 October, with the Proms season continuing until 12 September.
- Chineke! premiered Edmund Thornton Jenkins's 1918 Ballet at the Proms
- Reconstructed by his great-nephew after the composer died young
- Angel Blue sang Barber; Dvořák's Symphony No 8 closed the concert