Peta Stewart
A true hybrid, that’s pianist Rebeca Omordia, who is coming to Cape Town for a concert with the Cape Town Concert Series on 10 May 2025, and with the Johannesburg Music Society on 11 May. She is also here to work with South African composer Grant McLachlan.
Rebeca is a happy mix of many things – a love for western classical music and a passion for Nigerian classical music, performing works by African composers and performing works by western composers, most specifically British composers such as John Ireland. She did her bachelor’s degree in Bucharest, her master’s degree in Birmingham (where she also teaches though she moved to London 20 years ago), and her doctoral degree in Bucharest. As the daughter of a Nigerian father and a Romanian mother, she has also spent a lot of time in Nigeria, where her grandfather was a famous traditional flautist.
She grew up in the south of Romania, and fell in love with her sister’s piano teacher when she was six – and promptly announced to her parents that she would become a concert pianist.
“My parents were not at all surprised,” she says, “because they knew me as a determined person and they watched as I hijacked my sister’s piano and played for hours and hours, giving them respite from the energetic child I was. I think they thought I would grow out of it, but I never did.”
Birmingham Conservatoire
On the contrary, she embraced everything about classical music, and took up a scholarship to Birmingham Conservatoire after her talents were spotted, for her reputation in Romania was such that she was always on TV winning competition. In the UK, after being awarded the Delius Prize by cellist Julian Lloyd Webber, they formed a duo giving concerts of Delius, Elgar, John Ireland and other British composers in the UK and Europe.
“I developed a love of the music of John Ireland, and completed a CD of his works which will be released in the northern autumn.” She also took Ireland to Romania where he was the subject of her doctoral thesis.
African classical composers
Rebeca is committed to bringing African classical music to the stage.
“My programme in Cape Town, African Pianism, consists entirely of works by African classical composers such as Florence Price, Mokale Koapeng and Grant McLachlan and Akin Euba’s Yoruba Songs Without Words: Ore Meta. In Johannesburg I will play some of these works and add other composers like Ravel. I am so happy to be bringing these works to South Africa. Naturally, I include them in my concert series at the Wigmore Hall, where we are now in residence.”
Rebeca released her first CD which was such a success that it led to the first ever African Music Concert Series of instrumental music and songs which is now in its seventh year. She took the concerts online during Covid and a grant from the Arts Council in the UK allowed her to continue with the series.
Then the Wigmore Hall called her and in 2022 their first collaboration led to a partnership. Last year one of her concerts was with bassist Leon Bosch and baritone Theo Magongoma (who is a soloist in the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra’s collaboration with Opera UCT in a concert version of Il Trovatore in July) and with Grant McLachlan and coming out of this, she hopes, will be a new piano concerto. Grant arranged a piece for piano for Rebeca and that’s on her second album (she will be bringing some CDs to South Africa for those who are interested).
But she has a bigger reason for coming to South Africa. “I want to bring African pianism to the audience. I curated the programme like a journey, beginning in Nigeria and then travelling, north, east to Kenya, south to South Africa and back up to Nigeria. There is so much potential and so many composers that I am sorry I can’t perform more of them. While South Africa has a European tradition, there is a distinct style emerging, and this has been embraced by composers such as Mokale Koapeng and I will be programming more of his music in the coming years. It’s a great chance to connect with South African musicians.”
Rebeca’s plans extend even wider
“I would love to see more African classical composers included in all the great concert halls and I am working with people to do just that. It’s very satisfying to see venues like the Concertgebouw programming Joseph Bologne. By discovering and including composer like him they are recognising a whole music genre that has been in existence for perhaps 200 years. This helps us to build audiences, to blend traditional Wigmore audiences with new audiences and we need to make such concerts accessible.
No wonder she has been called an ‘African classical music pioneer’ by the BBC World Service, and ‘a classical music game changer’ by Classical Music.
What: Rebeca Omordia in African Pianism / Cape Town Concert Series
Where: Baxter Concert Hall/ Linder Auditorium, Johannesburg
When: 10 May, 11 am / 11 May, 15:00
Info: ctconcerts@iafrica.com / www.ctconcerts.co.za
Bookings Cape Town: Here
Johannesburg: Here
WS
