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Chineke!
Chineke! Orchestra () is a British orchestra, the first professional orchestra in Europe to be made up of majority Black & ethnically diverse musicians. The word Chineke derives from the Igbo language meaning "God". The orchestra was founded by musician Chi-chi Nwanoku CBE and their debut concert was in 2015 at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. Background Nwanoku, the orchestra's founder, coined its name from the word "Chi" in the Igbo language, which refers to "the god of creation of all good things", or "the spirit of creation". She was inspired by the use of the term in the novel '' Things Fall Apart'' by Chinua Achebe. Nwanoku has acknowledged that inspiration for founding the orchestra came from a conversation with Ed Vaizey, then the UK Minister of Culture, who noted to her that she was one of the very few musicians of colour on stage in a classical orchestra. She also took inspiration from attending a London concert of the Kinshasa Symphony, from the Democratic R ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chi-chi Nwanoku
Chinyere Adah "Chi-chi" Nwanoku (; born June 1956) is a British double bassist and professor of Historical Double Bass Studies at the Royal Academy of Music. Nwanoku was a founder member and principal bassist of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, a position she held for 30 years. Of Nigerian and Irish descent, she is the founder and Artistic Director of the Chineke! Orchestra, the first professional orchestra & junior orchestra in Europe to be made up of a majority of Black, Asian and ethnically diverse musicians.Jessica Duchen"Chineke! Europe's first professional orchestra of black and minority ethnic musicians launches" ''The Independent'', 1 September 2015. Early life Nwanoku is of Nigerian and Irish descent and is the oldest of the five children of her parents,"Our founder, Chi-chi Nwanoku MBE" Chineke! Found ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Daniel Kidane
Daniel Kidane (born 1986) is a British composer. His piece "Woke" opened the last night of the 2019 Proms. In 2016 his "Sirens" was one of a group of five short works commissioned by the BBC Philharmonic to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, and performed in the Bridgewater Hall. ''The Guardians reviewer described it as a "propulsive, eclectic piece" which "soaked up influences of jungle, dubstep and R&B sampled from a trawl through the city after dark. "His 2017 work "Zulu" was performed by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. His "Dream Song" was premiered at the Queen Elizabeth Hall by the Chineke! Orchestra on the re-opening of the hall in 2018 and the 50th anniversary of the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr., and includes words from his "I Have a Dream" speech. The concert was broadcast by BBC Radio 3. The orchestra later recorded the work on their album ''Spark Catchers''. In 2020 he was commissioned by Huddersfield Choral Society to write "We'll Si ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kevin John Edusei
Kevin John Edusei (born 1976) is a German conductor. He is in his eighth and final season as Chief Conductor of Munich Symphony Orchestra, and from the 2022/2023 season will be Principal Guest Conductor of Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra. Biography Early life Edusei is of mixed Ghanaian and German ancestry, with a Ghanaian physician father and a German historian, theologian and pastor mother. His maternal grandmother, Antonie Wingels, was an opera singer with the Theater Bielefeld. He learned piano as a child, and subsequently changed his musical study interests to percussion. At age 14, he became a percussionist with the youth orchestra in Ostwestfalen-Lippe. He studied percussion, sound engineering, and conducting at the Berlin University of the Arts. He continued his formal academic music studies at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, where his teachers included Jac van Steen and Ed Spanjaard. In the USA, Edusei held a 3-month conducting scholarship at the 2004 Aspen Musi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (15 August 18751 September 1912) was a British composer and conductor. Of mixed-race birth, Coleridge-Taylor achieved such success that he was referred to by white New York musicians as the "African Mahler" when he had three tours of the United States in the early 1900s. He was particularly known for his three cantatas on the epic 1855 poem ''The Song of Hiawatha'' by American Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Coleridge-Taylor premiered the first section in 1898, when he was 22. He married a British woman, Jessie Walmisley, and both their children had musical careers. Their son Hiawatha adapted his father's music for a variety of performances. Their daughter Avril Coleridge-Taylor became a composer-conductor. Early life and education Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was born at 15 Theobalds Road, Holborn, London, in 1875 to Alice Hare Martin (1856–1953), an English woman, and Daniel Peter Hughes Taylor, a Krio man from Sierra Leone who had studied medic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wayne Marshall (classical Musician)
Wayne Ea Marshall (born 13 January 1961, Oldham, Lancashire) is a British pianist, organist, and conductor. Biography Marshall was born to parents originally from Barbados. He began piano studies at age 3, and heard organ music regularly as a child through Sunday church services, which initiated his interest in the organ. He was a student at Chetham's School of Music, Manchester, from 1971 to 1979. Marshall continued his music studies at the Royal College of Music, where he held a Foundation scholarship, and was in parallel an Organ Scholar at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle. He did post-graduate studies at the Hochschule für Musik in Vienna from 1983-1984. As an organist, Marshall has served as organist and associate artist of the Bridgewater Hall, Manchester. In 2004, he gave the inaugural organ recital in the new Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles. Also in Los Angeles, in October 2004, he premiered James MacMillan's organ concerto '' A Scotch Bestiary'' with t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Southbank Centre
Southbank Centre is a complex of artistic venues in London, England, on the South Bank of the River Thames (between Hungerford Bridge and Waterloo Bridge). It comprises three main performance venues (the Royal Festival Hall including the National Poetry Library, the Queen Elizabeth Hall and the Purcell Room), together with the Hayward Gallery, and is Europe’s largest centre for the arts. It attracted 4.36 million visitors during 2019. Over two thousand paid performances of music, dance and literature are staged at Southbank Centre each year, as well as over two thousand free events and an education programme, in and around the performing arts venues. In addition, three to six major art exhibitions are presented at the Hayward Gallery yearly, and national touring exhibitions reach over 100 venues across the UK. Location Southbank Centre's site, which formerly extended to 21 acres (85,000 m2) from County Hall to Waterloo Bridge, is fronted by The Queen’s Walk. In ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Roderick Williams
Roderick Gregory Coleman Williams OBE (born 1965) is a British baritone and composer. Biography Williams was born in North London to a Welsh father and a Jamaican mother. He attended Christ Church Cathedral School in Oxford and Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School, a public school in Hertfordshire. He was a choral scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford, and then became a music teacher. At the age of 28, he resumed music studies at the Guildhall School of Music in London. At Guildhall, he made his operatic debut as Tarquinius in Benjamin Britten's ''The Rape of Lucretia''. Williams first appeared at The Proms in 1996 as the Royal Herald in Verdi's ''Don Carlos''. He was a soloist at the 2013 Proms production of Ralph Vaughan Williams' ‘A Sea Symphony’, and again in 2014 Last Night of the Proms, which included performances of his own arrangements of two songs. His commercial recordings include albums for Naxos and for Signum. In 2006, Williams and the Sacconi Quartet made the p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Queen Elizabeth Hall
The Queen Elizabeth Hall (QEH) is a music venue on the South Bank in London, England, that hosts classical, jazz, and avant-garde music, talks and dance performances. It was opened in 1967, with a concert conducted by Benjamin Britten. The QEH was built along with the smaller Purcell Room as part of Southbank Centre arts complex. It stands alongside the Royal Festival Hall, which was built for the Festival of Britain of 1951, and the Hayward Gallery which opened in 1968. History The QEH stands on the site of a former shot tower, built as part of a lead works in 1826 and retained for the Festival of Britain. The QEH and the Purcell Room were built together by Higgs and Hill and opened in March 1967. The venue was closed for two years of renovations in September 2015, and reopened in April 2018. Description The QEH has over 900 seats and the Purcell Room in the same building has 360 seats. The two auditoriums were designed by a team led by Hubert Bennett, head of the arch ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Things Fall Apart
''Things Fall Apart'' is the debut novel by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, first published in 1958. It depicts pre-colonial life in the southeastern part of Nigeria and the invasion by Europeans during the late 19th century. It is seen as the archetypal modern African novel in English, and one of the first to receive global critical acclaim. It is a staple book in schools throughout Africa and is widely read and studied in English-speaking countries around the world. The novel was first published in the UK in 1962 by William Heinemann Ltd, and became the first work published in Heinemann's African Writers Series. The novel follows the life of Okonkwo, an Igbo ("Ibo" in the novel) man and local wrestling champion in the fictional Nigerian clan of Umuofia. The work is split into three parts, with the first describing his family, personal history, and the customs and society of the Igbo, and the second and third sections introducing the influence of European colonialism and Chri ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bristol
Bristol () is a city, ceremonial county and unitary authority in England. Situated on the River Avon, it is bordered by the ceremonial counties of Gloucestershire to the north and Somerset to the south. Bristol is the most populous city in South West England. The wider Bristol Built-up Area is the eleventh most populous urban area in the United Kingdom. Iron Age hillforts and Roman villas were built near the confluence of the rivers Frome and Avon. Around the beginning of the 11th century, the settlement was known as (Old English: 'the place at the bridge'). Bristol received a royal charter in 1155 and was historically divided between Gloucestershire and Somerset until 1373 when it became a county corporate. From the 13th to the 18th century, Bristol was among the top three English cities, after London, in tax receipts. A major port, Bristol was a starting place for early voyages of exploration to the New World. On a ship out of Bristol in 1497, John Cabot, a Venetia ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Errollyn Wallen
Errollyn Wallen (born April 10, 1958) is a Belize-born British composer. Life Errollyn Wallen moved to London with her family when she was two. While her parents moved to New York, she and her three siblings (one of whom is the trumpeter Byron Wallen) were brought up by an aunt and uncle and she was educated at a boarding school.Jessica Duchen"Errollyn Wallen's 'Anon': Manon Lescaut for the 21st century" ''The Independent'', 21 July 2014. She credits her interest in poetry and music to her uncle whom she described in an interview as " Victorian" and responsible for her taking lessons in piano. Before studying music, she trained as a dancer at the Maureen Lyons School of Dance and the Urdang Academy, both in London. She moved to New York to further her training at the Dance Theatre of Harlem (1976-8) but later abandoned her training, turned to music composition and returned to the UK. She studied music at Goldsmiths (1981) and composition at King's College London (1983), and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Julian Joseph
Julian Raphael Nathaniel Joseph (born 11 May 1966) is a British jazz pianist, bandleader, composer, arranger, and broadcaster. Biography Joseph was born in London and attended Allfarthing Primary School and Spencer Park Secondary School in Wandsworth. He has worked solo, in his big band, trio, quartet, forum project band or electric band. Joseph works in both contemporary music, contemporary and traditional music, traditional situations with his music. He is also active in jazz education helping to form the jazz syllabus for the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music in Great Britain. Starting with his first album ''The Language of Truth'' in 1991, Joseph has six albums, one single, and one soundtrack to his credit, and has focused on live performance, composing, broadcasting and teaching. He performed at the 2003 London Jazz Festival and also hosts several radio shows on BBC Radio 3, including ''Jazz Line-up'' and ''Jazz Legends''. He has also made two jazz televisio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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