Richmond Times-Dispatch: Music review: Richmond Symphony Summer Series 'The Flower of England' ["Petite suite de concert" of Afro-British Composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor]

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) is profiled at AfriClassical.com, which features a comprehensive Works List and a Bibliography by Prof. Dominique-René de Lerma, www.CasaMusicaledeLerma.com.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Foundation Website: www.sctf.org.uk

 

Richmond Times-Dispatch

Music review: Richmond Symphony Summer Series 'The Flower of England'

By CLARKE BUSTARD Special correspondent

 

The Richmond Symphony Summer Series’ fourth season, “The Flower of England: From the Empire Through the Wars,” exploring the fertile but largely unfamiliar terrain of late-romantic and modern British chamber music, opened with one of the series’ few brand-name selections, Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “The Lark Ascending.”

Violinist Adrian Pintea and pianist Russell Wilson played the chamber arrangement of this bittersweet, impressionistic tone poem, written shortly before the outbreak of World War I and usually heard in its later, violin-and-orchestra incarnation.

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Wilson took a solo turn in the “Petite suite de concert” of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, an Edwardian-era composer whose Afro-British ancestry would be hard to detect in this set of decorous miniatures. The pianist made the most of the plentiful filagree of “La caprice de Nanette” and “La tarantelle frétillante,” saving his most expressive playing for the quasi-waltz “Demande et réponse.”