South African cellist Abel Selaocoe makes his CSO debut at Ravinia

Little about Abel Selaocoe is conventional. While his repertoire does include Haydn’s Cello Concerto in C major and Debussy’s Sonata in D minor, the South African cellist is just as likely to be playing music from his home continent with his trio Chesaba or joining the Manchester Collective in inventive cross-cultural pursuits.

“My goal in my musical life,” he said from London, “is to take this instrument that I’ve learned from a very young age in a classical manner and connect it to where I’m from, allowing the culture of a stringed instrument like the cello or violin to evolve as it visits different cultural spaces.”

Much of the music Selaocoe performs is his own, including what is rapidly becoming one of his best-known and most successful works, a cello concerto titled Four Spirits. The cellist-composer will perform the four-movement piece July 13 at the Ravinia Festival with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which returns for its 88th summer residency at the historic outdoor venue in Highland Park. The appearance with Marin Alsop, Ravinia’s chief conductor, will mark both his Ravinia and CSO debuts.

“With these kinds of collaborations,” Selaocoe said, “it’s always a feeling of newness, of spontaneity and also just trying to discover people and know people. The Chicago Symphony is an incredible orchestra, and I can’t wait to delve into my style and see how they influence it and what they take from it. It will be a very creative experience, I’m sure.”

“My goal in my musical life is to take this instrument that I’ve learned from a very young age in a classical manner and connect it to where I’m from, allowing the culture of a stringed instrument like the cello or violin to evolve as it visits different cultural spaces.”

The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra premiered Four Spirits in March 2023 in Glasgow, and it has since been performed by an array of other ensembles, including the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra and South Netherlands Philharmonic. “Not a long time ago,” the cellist said of the premiere, “but the piece has had a really beautiful journey.”

Writing in the Scotsman, music critic Ken Walton described the work as a “visceral piece of performance art” with Selaocoe as the central protagonist. “The cello,” he wrote, “was just part of the armory: as much focus was placed on his evocative singing, his hyperactive physicality and the theatrical partnership he engaged in with guest percussionist Bernhard Schimpelsberger. Selaocoe was frequently up on his feet gesticulating to the players, even to the audience whom he charmed into vocalized action for a participative, ritualistic finale.”

The 32-year-old cellist earned his artist’s diploma at Manchester’s Royal Northern College of Music in 2018 and has remained in the English city since. He calls himself a “student of other musics,” exploring the musical traditions in his native South Africa and other African countries like Tanzania and “retranslating” what he finds for the cello. “That’s my life work, and I will probably be doing that for a very long time,” he said.  

Selaocoe’s first album, Where Is Home (Hae Ke Kae), which he released last year on the Warner Classics label, reflects this approach, drawing on what he called the “crazy parallels” between what baroque composers like J.S. Bach and Giovanni Benedetto Platti were doing and what was happening at the same time in Africa. “The parallels are super important in terms of human evolution and progression even though they were not connected by the internet at that time, so nobody knew who was doing what,” he said.

In his liner notes for the album, the cellist notes that even when he was young he was making connections between baroque and African music, especially in South African churches where the two traditions occupied the same space centuries ago. He notes how both kinds of music lend themselves to improvisation and how African hymns have bass lines similar to those in baroque music.

He explores these connections in his own compositional contributions as well as works like Platti’s Cello Sonata No. 7 in D, in which he changed up the original instrumentation. He paired a baroque-era theorbo with a kora, a 21-string West African instrument, along with cello and double bass and added improvised interludes between the four movements. “Together we improvise our way through this wonderful sonata, finding common strands between this African music, baroque music and the practice of improvisation,” he writes.

Selaocoe managed to round up an impressive list of more than 15 collaborators for the recording, including famed fellow cellist Yo-Yo Ma, whom he has admired since he was a child; percussionist Mamadou Sarr, and jazz vocalist Cherise Adams-Burnett. “The idea of spontaneity and coming up with music in the now is quite a beautiful thing to do with somebody you have never met or worked with, because you have different DNAs, but, somehow in that very moment, it just kind of works,” he said.

In 2016, the cellist formed Chesaba — a trio that explores the music of Africa through the cultural lenses of its three members, who beside Selaocoe include West African percussionist Sidiki Dembélé and electric bassist Alan Keary, who is of Irish descent. Three years later, he and the Manchester Collective created a program titled Sirocco, a name taken from the wind that blows from Africa toward Italy.

Much like the music on Selaocoe’s album, the six musicians combine South African folk traditions with music from the Western canon — what the collective’s website describes as classical strings dancing to the beat of African drums and electric bass. “It’s trying to find a vessel that speaks of the influences between Europe and Africa,” he said. “It’s not only through colonialization that we meet but through time, through what happened after that conflict.”

He and the Collective brought Sirocco to North America in April, a tour that included stops at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Kaufmann Concert Hall in New York City and Bing Concert Hall at Stanford University in California. “It was awesome, the cellist said. “The audience was very open-minded, and I think that is sometimes what you need when you walk into a space and you are going to do something that includes different cultures. If people are not willing to change character or listen in new ways, it becomes more difficult.”

Selaocoe was born South African township of Sebokeng in 1992, two years before the brutal oppression of apartheid came to an end. Classical music was virtually non-existent there, but his older brother, a budding bassoonist, and a friend uncovered an outreach program in Soweto and began traveling the 30 or so miles there every weekend for lessons. “It was a very rare thing that they did. Nobody else ever does that in the township,” the cellist said. Selaocoe began tagging along, playing recorder at first, and his brother later suggested he try the cello. “He pushed me in that direction, and we never looked back,” he said.