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
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Chineke! is a UK orchestra founded to champion Black and ethnically diverse classical musicians, and it regularly performs at the BBC Proms, the summer season of classical concerts held at London's Royal Albert Hall. This particular concert centred on music by composers whose work has been neglected by the mainstream classical repertoire, reflecting a broader push within classical music to recover and re-examine historical figures who were overlooked because of their race.
The central figure is Edmund Thornton Jenkins, an American composer born in South Carolina who worked in Europe in the early twentieth century and died young in Paris. His piece for this concert had never been performed in full and had to be pieced together from incomplete original scores. The programme also featured soprano Angel Blue performing works including a well-known piece by Samuel Barber, alongside a symphony by the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák.
The conductor was Jonathon Heyward, who leads the orchestra for this performance. The review assesses how the evening's mix of rediscovered and established repertoire came together in performance, rather than reporting any single news event.