Ubuntu Ensemble Review – South African War Music Pictures | Classical music

Ohn June 16, 1976more than 10,000 students from Soweto took to the streets in a peaceful protest against the apartheid regime. Police responded with gunfire. It was the start of months of conflict, a turning point in South Africa’s history. Freedom Music – a day of concerts at Wigmore Hall – celebrated 50 years of the uprising, which culminated with Leon Bosch and the Ubuntu Ensemble.

Double-bassist Bosch is the son of an activist father, and he was also arrested in 1976 – an event that interrupted his plans to study law, leading him to music. In a room full of South Africans, on and off the pitch, it was one of many such stories, the air in silence.

A series of South African music scenes spanned almost a century, from the first generation of famous singers of the 1940s – the sound of Europe was still at the forefront of their ears – to the new voice of the 1960s and today, Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika a musical heart line that runs through many.

In the middle was a concert of Red Ink (2019), Shane Woodborne’s fun in Soweto for childhood friend Bosch. The double bass is a popular solo instrument, a low-pitched sound that shakes the foundations of Ubuntu music. Struggle is included in all the great works (not for nothing Saint-Saëns threw the instrument like an elephant in his Carnival of the Animals), here he lends to the musical methods that came at the price of visibility – Bosch is a lonely and fragile voice of hope.

The successive works of the composer Grant MacLachlan culminated in the false waves of Obsidian Skies of 2025 – a kind of Fantasia from South Africa on the subject of Thomas Tallis who created a string quartet within a large orchestra, each trying to find and hold the glittering chorus. After the bitterness and doubts of Monthati Masebe’s LEFA (2024) – a reflection on the legacy of the post-apartheid generation, and the unfulfilled promises – led to the rise of Jan-Hendrik Harley’s South African Suite (2025): a celebration, Bosch explained, “of what it means to be South African”. The singers added stamps and claps to the dance sequences, sending us out with the thrilling arpeggios of Mango Groove’s Special Star still moving through the hall.