William Grant Still Danzas de Panama for string quintet
Carlos Simon Warmth for Other Suns for string quartet
Matthew Rooke An a Craw can Sing an Aw for bass clarinet, string quintet
Coleridge-Taylor Quintet for Clarinet and string quartet
To be Young, Gifted and Black presented by Chineke! and curated by Berginald Rash draws inspiration from the vastness of the Black diaspora, its reach and resilience through struggle and its expansive understanding of intersectional identity.
Listeners will stretch across continents from the Americas in Grant Still’s Danzas de Panama which takes afro-caribbean/afro-latiné dance forms and themes and combines them in a lush yarn of strings and give way to the embodied storytelling featured in Carlos Simon’s Warmth from Other Suns which charts the mass exodus of African Americans in search of belonging and the freedom to grow, perhaps from the warmth of other suns, from the rural South in what became known as the Great Migration.
From there listeners will reach across the Atlantic to the United Kingdom where in Matthew Rooke’s An a Craw can Sing an Aw we hear invocations on the bass clarinet, a robust reply to Vaughan Williams’ hallowed Lark Ascending, mirroring the lightness and freedom of bird song now imbued with the depth, gravity and resoluteness of the Black diasporic experience, resplendent with Elgarian imagery and Copland-esque colours.
Wrapping up this sojourn, we’ll hear Coleridge-Taylor’s formidable quintet for clarinet and strings inspired by Brahms’ own autumnal clarinet quintet while inhabiting the tones, palette, verve and energy of Black and indigenous music and offering them up in a deeply earthy, sumptuous, velvety prayer in its second movement.
Chineke!’s To be Young, Gifted and Black is a chance to reflect on the multiplicities of Black identity, experience and perception and understand the ways in which these are not monolithic and how, through lived experience, they vary in as many shades and stories as the number of people who live and tell them.
Reception
A complimentary drinks reception will follow the concert.
About the Platnauer Concerts
The Platnauer Concerts were established in memory of Maurice Platnauer, Principal of Brasenose College from 1956 to 1960. Held on Friday evenings during term, the concerts are open to all.