Curated and produced by Awuor Onguru, a Kenyan musician and Yale University alumna, Surviving Death offers an evening where classical music meets new concept art, challenging the ways audiences experience live performance. The event is not only a landmark moment for contemporary classical music in Nairobi but also signals a new beginning for Shah Houses as a performance space — introducing Ngara to the world of chamber music, projection art, and live storytelling.
“Surviving Death is a reflection on the ways we confront loss and the search for meaning that follows,” says Onguru, who has performed internationally and has now returned home to develop Kenya’s growing arts ecosystem.
Awuor Onguru
It’s about finding beauty in grief, light in darkness, and new landscapes inside the emotions we often avoid.”
The concert’s centrepiece is the African premiere of The Ascendant, an electrifying composition by Australian-born composer Wally Gunn (currently based at Princeton University) and award-winning poet Maria Zajkowski. Originally written in 2014, The Ascendant is a daring 40-minute suite for vocal ensemble and electronic track, with Zajkowski’s vivid poems forming its lyrical backbone.
“My inspiration for The Ascendant was a unique experience of loss,” Zajkowski reflects.
The moment the living move into death we have access to a truth, which is that there is a love we can only feel through grief, and a landscape we must learn to inhabit. I hope audiences will hear themselves in The Ascendant, and see themselves where the landscape finds them.”
Gunn, who has previously collaborated with some of America’s leading new music ensembles, found himself deeply moved by Zajkowski’s writing. “Maria’s poems stay withyou; they have a way of getting under your skin and leaving you unsettled,” Gunn says. “When I read her collection The Ascendant, I found myself transported to her landscape of loss, grief, love. I wondered if I could create music that would carry her words, open an additional realm of feeling, and resonate with listeners.”
Now, a decade after its creation, the piece will make its Nairobi debut under Onguru’s artistic direction, the piece will be performed by a chamber choir drawn from some of Kenya’s rising young vocal talents. Using immersive projection art, spatial sound design, and the raw human voice.
The choir in rehearsal
Surviving Death promises to be a groundbreaking reimagining of what classical concerts in Nairobi can be.
The choice of Shah Houses, a lesser-known historic venue in Ngara, is intentional. “Part of this project is about expanding what we consider performance spaces in Nairobi,” Onguru explains. “Ngara has deep cultural roots, and it’s time we opened up more spaces for world-class classical and contemporary music here.”
Alongside The Ascendant, the evening will feature a blend of African choral music and modern classical works by composers such as Eric Whitacre and Sergei Rachmaninoff, stitched together into an evening that feels less like a traditional recital and more like ajourney through loss, resilience, and rebirth.
At just 22 years old, Onguru is quickly establishing herself as one of Nairobi’s most dynamic new voices in classical and interdisciplinary art. After graduating from Yale, where she performed as a Scholar of Music and led numerous ensembles, she has returned to Nairobi to create bold, community-rooted musical projects that speak to a changing generation.
Surviving Death is not just a concert. It’s a new beginning — for Nairobi’s classical music scene, for the space at Shah Houses, and for the many young artists stepping into their own landscapes of loss, hope, and creation.