Four Spirits from Abel Selaocoe

Abel Selaocoe is back - and how! The dynamic virtuoso, the man who puts the ‘extended’ into ‘extended techniques’ for the cello, the consummate synthesiser of South African musical idioms with the Western classical canon. 

His latest album, Four Spirits, features his new concertante work for cello and orchestra, with a significant role for percussionist Bernhard Schimpelsberger as a kind of secondary soloist, and the Aurora Orchestra under Nicholas Collon. But to call the soloist role the ‘cello’ is to grossly under-sell Selaocoe’s artistry. The soloist is simply Selaocoe himself - anchored to his cello, yes, but incorporating generous amounts of singing and other vocalisations (some of which the orchestra join in with - the idea of instrumentalists having a vocal strand to their musicianship is clearly one that Selaocoe wants to evangelise, not keep to himself). 

The middle of the third movement sees a particularly extended passage of these, with Selaocoe and Schimpelsberger bouncing off each other in a way that reminded me almost of Steve Reich’s Clapping Music or Music for Pieces of Wood - pure rhythmic élan, with pitch and melody temporarily set aside as unneeded distractions from the sheer inventive interplay between the two. It comes across as a kind of expanded scat singing but drawing from a far broader sonic palette. Get used, both here and elsewhere, to Selaocoe incorporating growls and overtone-laden throat-singing alongside more lyrical vocal passages.

Much of this will likely be sounding rather familiar to those who enjoyed his previous album Hymns of Bantu and his wildly acclaimed début Where is Home / Hae Ke Kae, and indeed this concerto comes from a pretty similar place, equally personal and equally inseparable from Selaocoe as an individual. Insofar as Four Spirits has a theme, it’s rooted in Selaocoe’s memories of growing up in the Sebokeng township (thirty miles or so outside Johannesburg) in the 1990s and 2000s - encountering a wealth of musical and religious traditions, and experiences that he pours into each of the four movements. Back in February, Katherine spoke to Abel about some of the ways this unique mixture took shape in his life, and how it shaped his musical development.

At times the cello is almost more of a prop and a tool that sits in the background - one imagines perhaps a medieval bard strumming a chord or two while delivering a dramatic narration. In fact that’s almost exactly how the fourth movement opens - only with a warm, affirming chant of Uthando (‘love’), in which the orchestra (and audience) join as a mantra over which Selaocoe vocally improvises. But at other times it’s front and centre, just as a more conventional concerto would demand - the tension between the instrumental and vocal elements of Selaocoe’s performance is resolved by joyfully embracing both, rather than by choosing one over the other. That two-part final movement - Uthando, followed by Malibongwe (‘be praised’, a paean to any and all higher powers) - provides a genuinely uplifting conclusion to a work that has put everyone in the room, both on stage and in the audience, through their paces in one way or another. 

The more I write, the more I feel that I’m weakening the case for seeing Four Spirits as a cello concerto in any meaningful sense, though it certainly has cello-concerto DNA in its ancestry. Well, maybe that doesn’t matter. It’s its own thing, sui generis, mirroring its composer-soloist. The sleeve notes observe, not unreasonably, that it’s so deeply tied to who Abel Selaocoe is as a person and as an artist that it might never be taken up by anyone else. I don’t know which way I lean on this - on the one hand, I don’t think anyone else could tell this story, and it’s not hard to imagine ways in which other cellists’ attempts to tread the same path could fail to stick the landing. But on a simpler and less philosophically fraught level… it’s just a beautiful piece, particularly in the flowering final movement, and it would be a shame if it never flew the nest and entered the broader repertoire. 

Readers who are quick off the mark and within travelling distance of Edinburgh’s Usher Hall can catch a performance of this concerto - alongside an off-copy rendition of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5! - on Monday 18th August at 7.30pm. Tickets are available from https://www.auroraorchestra.com/event/edinburgh-2025/shostakovich-abel-selaocoe/.