Chineke! Orchestra/Heyward review – kaleidoscopic concert combines energy and complexity

Royal Albert Hall, London
The ethnically diverse orchestra played with vigour and spirit in a varied programme that included Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Shostakovich and Valerie Coleman

This concert was to have been conducted by Simon Rattle – a mark of the esteem in which leading artists hold Chineke! Orchestra, the trailblazing British ensemble made up of a majority of Black and ethnically diverse musicians. In the event, Charleston-born Jonathon Heyward put his own indelible stamp on a varied yet satisfying program.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s La Bamboula, a kaleidoscopic dance with roots in the West Indies, played to Chineke!’s strengths. The performed it with vigour and spirit, while Heyward kept its likable blend of late-Victorian tunefulness and proto-Hollywood glitz gossamer-light. You could see why Henry Wood programmed it at the Proms 16 times, making its subsequent 91-year absence inexplicable.