MA Top 30 Professional: Chi-Chi Nwankoku

Founder and Artistic Director
Chineke! Foundation

In 2015, Chi-chi Nwanoku founded the Chineke! Orchestra, which champions diversity in classical music, its name meaning God/Creator in the Igbo language of Nigeria, her father’s homeland. The London-based ensemble’s debut at the Southbank Centre included works by British Black composers, including the Ballade for Orchestra by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.

“None of us in the orchestra, made up of 62 musicians of color in that first concert, had ever played a piece by Coleridge-Taylor, even though he was born in London and studied at the Royal College of Music,” says Nwanoku, also a founding member of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, with which she was principal double bass for 30 years. “That just showed how unknown the contributions of Black classical musicians were.”

In the 2024-25 season, Chineke! is giving up to 24 orchestral concerts, along with as many as 14 chamber programs. It toured Germany and Belgium in November, with mostly works by Black composers, including the world premiere of Brian Raphael Nabors’s Concerto for Orchestra. Since 2017, the orchestra has played often in the BBC Proms at Royal Albert Hall. Its first appearance in the summer festival featured electrifying solo performances by Trinidadian soprano Jeanine De Bique and cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, a relative unknown at the time.

“Both were making their Proms debut, and they’ve since gone on to substantial international careers,” Nwanoku says. “That basically personifies what Chineke! is all about. We do what every other orchestra in the world does, which is to play concerts. But we also have another purpose, and that is to shine a spotlight on and diversify the musicians who play and what the audience hears.” The orchestra has released five CDs, and she is especially proud of a double album of Coleridge-Taylor works, including the world premiere of Sussex Landscape by the composer’s daughter, Avril Coleridge-Taylor.

Nwanoku credits, in part, being a double bass player for her pivotal role in broadening the reach of British classical music. “In an orchestra, our instrument is the foundation and heartbeat of everything,” she says. “Not just the harmonic foundation but also the rhythmic foundation. We are rarely in the limelight, we rarely get the big tune, but we are always there, supporting everything.”