Various composers: Where Is Home (Hae Ke Kae)

Abel Selaocoe’s debut recording Where Is Home (Hae Ke Kae) won the Newcomer Award at the BBC Music Magazine Awards 2023, for a disc that deliberately refuses to sit inside one genre. Selaocoe is a South African-born, UK-based cellist, singer and composer, and the record moves between Baroque cello repertoire, his own newly written pieces sung in Sesotho and Zulu, and extended vocal techniques, including overtone singing and throat singing drawn from Southern African musical traditions, layered against or alongside the cello writing rather than kept separate from it.

About the programme

The classical repertoire on the disc is genuinely substantial rather than a token gesture toward tradition: Giovanni Benedetto Platti’s Cello Sonata No. 7 in D major appears in full across four movements, and Selaocoe plays the Sarabandes from both Bach’s Cello Suite No. 3 in C major and Cello Suite No. 5 in C minor, two of the most recorded movements in the unaccompanied cello repertoire, here placed directly alongside his own compositions rather than programmed as a separate “classical half” of the disc. His original pieces carry titles in Sesotho and Zulu, among them Ibuyile I’Africa (“Africa is Back”), Lerato (“Love”) and Zawose, written in tribute to the Tanzanian musician and multi-instrumentalist Hukwe Zawose, and draw on South African vocal traditions Selaocoe grew up with, sung and played by Selaocoe himself rather than layered on afterward.

About the performer and guests

Selaocoe trained as a cellist at Manchester’s Chetham’s School of Music and the Royal Northern College of Music, building a career that runs in parallel across solo classical performance, his own compositions, and cross-genre collaboration rather than treating those as separate tracks. He has held a close working partnership with the Manchester Collective since 2019, co-devising their Sirocco programme, made his solo BBC Proms debut in 2021, and has held artist-in-association roles with both the BBC Singers and BBC National Orchestra of Wales, a set of connections to established UK classical institutions that sits alongside, rather than instead of, his genre-crossing work. Two significant guest musicians appear on the recording: cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and lutenist and theorbo player Elizabeth Kenny, both contributing to a record whose stated premise, held together by Selaocoe’s own playing and singing, is that Baroque cello writing and South African vocal tradition aren’t as far apart as a conventional classical-label track listing might suggest.

About the technique

The extended vocal techniques Selaocoe brings to the recording, overtone (or throat) singing, in which a single singer sustains a low fundamental pitch while shaping resonant overtones into audible separate melodic lines above it, are drawn from Southern African and, more broadly, Central Asian vocal traditions rather than being a Western classical practice adapted for effect. Selaocoe has spoken about growing up around this kind of singing and layering it directly against his own cello playing rather than treating voice and instrument as separate elements of a performance, sometimes singing and bowing simultaneously. That combination, a classically trained cellist bringing a genuinely different vocal tradition into direct dialogue with Baroque repertoire, rather than performing the two side by side as separate “halves” of a programme, is a large part of why Where Is Home reads as something more integrated than a typical genre-crossing crossover record.

A note on this page

This is a freshly written review of a real, recent recording rather than a page recovered from mmmusic’s original 1991–2018 archive, which had already closed by the time this disc was released. It’s written from independently verified facts about the recording, its award and its performers, as part of the site’s ongoing coverage of new classical releases alongside the material recovered from the original shop’s run.