Ubuntu Band Review – Musically Charged Snapshots of the South African Struggle | classical music

HeyOn June 16, 1976, more than 10,000 students from Soweto took to the streets in a peaceful protest against the apartheid regime. The police responded with gunfire. It was the spark that ignited months of conflict, and marked a turning point in South African history. Songs of Freedom – a day of concerts at Wigmore Hall – celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Rising, culminating in a performance by Leon Bush and the Ubuntu Band.

Double bassist Bush is the son of an activist father, and was himself arrested in 1976 – an event that derailed his ambitions to study law, pushing him instead towards music. In a room full of South Africans, on stage and off, this was one of many similar stories, and the atmosphere was quietly charged.

A series of South African musical snapshots spanning nearly a century, from the first recognized generation of art music composers in the 1940s – with the sounds of Europe still primarily in their ears – to the new sounds of the 1960s and up to the present day, Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika, a melodic line that permeates many.

At the center was Red Ink (2019), an elegiac Soweto-inspired concerto by Shane Woodburn for childhood friend Bush. The double bass is an exotic solo instrument, a low-key texture that shakes the foundations of the Ubuntu String Orchestra. Struggle is embedded in every large-scale gesture (it is no coincidence that Saint-Saëns cast the machine in the role of the elephant in his Carnival of the Animals), lending a pathos to the lyricism that has come at an obvious cost – Bosch an increasingly fragile and lonely voice of hope.

A series of works by film composer Grant MacLachlan culminated in the hypnotic waves of 2025’s Obsidian Skies – a kind of South African fantasia on a Thomas Tallis theme that frames a string quartet within a larger string orchestra, each striving to find and hold on to a radiant choral-like theme. After the bitterness and doubt of Monate Masebi’s LEFA (2024) – a meditation on the legacy of the post-apartheid generation, and broken promises – he launched an upward trend towards Jan-Hendrik Harle’s South African Pavilion (2025): a celebration, as Bush puts it, of “what it means to be South African”. The musicians added stamps and claps to the synchronized dances, sending us out to the cheerful arpeggios of Mango Groove’s Special Star still wafting through the hall.