Enjoy an extraordinary evening of music as the Chineke! Junior Orchestra takes the stage for their highly anticipated summer concert, marking the culmination of their annual week-long residential course.

They are thrilled to make their return to the stage at the iconic Fairfield Halls in Croydon.

The Chineke! Junior Orchestra is the sister ensemble to the Chineke! Orchestra, and is made up of majority Black and ethnically diverse musicians aged 11 - 22. Both ensembles were founded simultaneously in 2015 with the aim of creating opportunities for emerging and established musicians of Black and ethnically diverse heritage.

This concert comes at the end of an intensive musical week spent together rehearsing and exploring the music that they will perform, as well as receiving individual tuition from members of the professional Chineke! orchestra, who act as mentors, teachers and role models.

The concert opens with Adolphus Hailstork’s 1985 piece, An American Port of Call, described by the composer as capturing “the strident (and occasionally tender and even mysterious energy of a busy American port city. The great port of Norfolk, Virginia, where I live, was the direct inspiration.

Avril Coleridge-Taylor moved to the Sussex countryside in 1939. Although the title of her tone poem Sussex Landscape suggests a pastoral idyll, the work is a moving response to the ongoing threat of World War Two.

The final work, Mussorgsky’s 1874 Pictures at an Exhibition, vividly describes ten artworks by the composer’s close friend, artist Viktor Hartmann. It was written in homage a year after the artist’s death. Ravel’s 1922 orchestration brings the images and colours to full, majestic life.