An immersive orchestral experience featuring young musicians from Lambeth alongside Europe’s first majority black orchestra will take place at Lambeth Town Hall this weekend.
The latest in a series of Orchitecture performances by production company Aswarm wil see the Chineke! Orchestra give a series of short performances of Samuel Coleridge Taylor’s Othello Suite on Saturday afternoon.
The musicians from the renowned ensemble will be joined by four highly skilled young violinists, aged between 13-16, from Lambeth Music Service’s training orchestras.
A music service spokesperson said: “The opportunity to perform with other people gives you loads of skills.
“Just being aware of being in that space, confidence for performing, and socially it’s great, because it helps people just relax in that environment, and they become used to doing it.
“A very key thing is to work in this kind of mentee-mentoring way. It just gives people that extra confidence.”
During each of the four, 30-minute-long performances, ticketholders will be able to move around the building, where members of the orchestra will be performing in different rooms.
The instrumentalists will be conducted by Enyi Okpara, 25, whose image will be conveyed via video link to monitors across the building.
Okpara recalled he had worked on projects during the Covid-19 pandemic which required him to patch together individual musical parts to form an orchestral sound, but this will be his first time doing so live.
He said: “I’m just curious to see how it works.
“It’s kind of exciting to be in a process where there are a few unknowns, and being able to experiment with what you hear sound-wise is quite a nice thing to do.”
The Othello Suite was written by Anglo-African composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor for a 1912 production of Shakespeare’s play at His Majesty’s Theatre.
Okpara described the suite as having something for everyone, with a healthy balance between grit, intensity and lyricism.
He went on to emphasise that, at its core, the purpose of an orchestra is to serve the residents of the locality.
Okpara said: “There’s a reason why the London Symphony Orchestra is called the London Symphony Orchestra.
“Fundamentally, orchestras are about serving communities and bringing music into the lives of community members.”
The collaboration was created with the community of Lambeth at its heart and half of the tickets available for the performance, which has sold out, were allocated for residents of the borough.
A council spokesperson said: “It will promote the Town Hall as a welcoming, creative, civic space and provide an opportunity to increase footfall and engage with Lambeth’s community.”
Picture credit: Robin Sones
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