London’s Chineke! Orchestra – Europe’s first majority Black and ethnically diverse orchestra – made a notable debut at the BBC Proms in 2017, won the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Gamechanger Award in 2019, and were a career launchpad for cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason. In March this year, Chineke! performed at the Adelaide Festival, and in a feature in our January/February 2022 issue, The Chinese! Effect, Deborah Cheetham spoke with Chineke!s Artistic and Executive Director Chi-chi Nwakoku ahead of the concerts. Over the years, Chineke! has commissioned 14 works by living Black composers and two Indigenous Australians – Cheetham and William Barton. The orchestra’s latest coup is a deal with Decca to record the music of lost, unheard or neglected voices, starting with a double album of music by British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912). Clive Paget caught up with Chi-chi Nwanoku to find out more.

The deal with Decca is great news. How did it come about?

There’s been a lot of activity around us in the last couple of years, and during the lockdown we got even more active, because there was an emptiness somewhere, I think. It’s horrible to say it, but the murder of George Floyd awakened a lot...