DailyMail.co.uk: Elizabeth Llewellyn pays tribute to Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

Elizabeth Llewellyn

(facebook.com)

Daily Mail

London, U.K.

Leading soprano Elizabeth Llewellyn pays tribute to Samuel Coleridge-Taylor in an evening of music by the accomplished but forgotten composer

St James's Church, Piccadilly, London

Elizabeth Llewellyn, one of our leading Verdi sopranos, rarely does recitals. But as a proud black Briton, she has a strong fellow feeling for Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, son of a Sierra Leone doctor, who in his brief life (1875-1912) became so famous but is now so forgotten.

Coleridge-Taylor’s father returned to Africa while Coleridge-Taylor was only a child, leaving his British mother to bring him up alone in Croydon. He soon showed exceptional musical gifts, which prompted a member of the congregation at their church to pay for him to go to the Royal College of Music.

Here he excelled, winning golden opinions from his composition teacher, Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, from Ralph Vaughan Williams, and indeed from Sir Edward Elgar, who got Coleridge-Taylor one of his first commissions while still only a student, from the Three Choirs Festival.

At the RCM, Coleridge-Taylor wrote the first of his cantatas based on the then fashionable epic poem The Song Of Hiawatha. It created a sensation, and even during the Twenties was regularly performed at the Royal Albert Hall.

Sadly, by then Coleridge-Taylor was no longer with us. He died, aged only 37, of pneumonia.