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16 January 2022
Joyous Celebration of Fifty Years of David Fanshawe’s
African Sanctus
Birmingham
Keneish Dance Company
Ex Cathedra
City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra
CBSO SO Vocal
16th January 2022
Symphony Hall, Birmingham
4.5 ****(*)
Reviewers: David Gray and Paul Gray
@ReviewsGate
David Fanshawe – African Sanctus (Golden Anniversary Performance)
It is chastening to think that the ethno-musical recordings made by David Fanshawe in his
travels through Africa, which form the basis of his African Sanctus, are now over fifty years
old. In their introduction to this performance, given to mark the 50th anniversary of its first
performance, Fanshawe’s wife, Jane, and daughter, Rachel, poignantly revealed that one of
those recorded voices had died three months after the recording was made, and that another
group of Ugandan men had been killed during the horrors of Idi Amin’s regime.
The power of Fanshawe’s Sanctus lies in its ability make a cohesive blend out of what might,
in other hands, be a clash of contrasts – a contrast of cultures, and the contrast between the
spontaneous, improvised, free nature of the source recordings – and the more structured
approach of western classical musical forms.
