Atlantic Requiem: A Concert Memorial for Enslaved Africans Explained
David Önaç's Atlantic Requiem will premiere at LSO St Luke's in London on Sunday 11 October 2026, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra and BBC Singers The Guardian. The Manchester-based composer wrote the 40-minute work to honour enslaved Africans.
The piece has five movements, or sections. The performance is scheduled for 4pm LSO and will be conducted by Grammy award-winning conductor Malcolm J Merriweather. The performances are taking place during Black History Month.
The commission comes from arts and heritage charity Culture& and is sponsored by Lloyd's. Dr Errol Francis is artistic director and chief executive of Culture&. Francis was a member of the steering group overseeing research into Lloyd's historical involvement in the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans.
The libretto, the sung text, combines Catholic liturgy — the traditional words of a Requiem Mass for the dead — with historic insurance documents and testimony about the killing of an enslaved African woman aboard a ship. LSO St Luke's will host the premiere rather than a church, so it will be heard as a concert memorial rather than a religious service.
The project grew out of research into Lloyd's of London, whose members helped insure ships and enslaved Africans during the transatlantic slave trade. Culture& approached Lloyd's to commission a work memorialising the lost lives of enslaved Africans. Francis leads Culture& and also sat on the research steering group.
The second movement draws on 1791 grand jury testimony, a formal witness account given to a legal panel, about the killing of an enslaved African woman aboard the brig Polly, commanded by James DeWolf. The testimony is preserved by the Newport Historical Society and records the account of crew member John Cranston. Önaç sets that eighteenth-century legal language inside the requiem structure, where it interrupts the expected liturgical order.
The broader context here is how institutions use new art to handle difficult archive findings. Lloyd's sponsored research into underwriting, the business of insuring ships and enslaved people, then sponsored a choral-orchestral response to that history. Archival disclosure creates a public record. A new performance translates that record for a wider audience. The use of a full orchestra and professional choir points to civic scale.
In my view, the questions to watch concern reception and reuse. A five-movement requiem built from liturgy, insurance ledgers and grand jury testimony can work as a single-evening commemoration or as lasting repertoire. Whether presenters programme it beyond Black History Month, whether educators pair the score with the Polly testimony and insurance documents, and how critics assess a memorial partly funded by the institution whose archive it examines will shape its weight. The work stages those tensions in sound, on a London stage, in the autumn season.
