Slowly but surely, our perceptions of what a composer looked like in the early 20th century are widening. Chineke!’s ongoing mission to unearth music by forgotten Black composers here brought about the belated premiere of Ballet by Edmund Thornton Jenkins, its incomplete manuscript parts reconstructed by his great-nephew Tuffus Zimbabwe.
Growing up in Charleston, South Carolina, Jenkins died in Paris aged only 32, having made a name for himself as a rising composer and band leader. In between he studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where in 1918 he wrote his three-movement Ballet. It sounded persuasive here, as conducted by Jonathon Heyward. A substantial opening Processional, ominous then light-footed, gives way to a second movement beginning with a bubbling flute duet and a florid viola solo; together, these repeatedly show a gift for weaving together melody and countermelody. The flaw is in the finale, where the waltz that dominates the movement sounds unavoidably slender and staid next to the trumpet fanfare that announces it. Still, Jenkins rounds things off with an exuberant, uptempo ending.
