Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912)
Coleridge-Taylor's Violin Concerto shines ready for this idealistic orchestra's tour
Friday, 08 November 2019
The Chineke! Orchestra, founded by double-bassist Chi-chi Nwanoku as the first majority BME orchestra in the UK, is heading off this week on a substantial European tour, which began last night at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.
Since the organisation has a strong track record in promoting rare
music by composers of colour, this looked at first like a relatively
conservative programme, topped and tailed with Weber’s Oberon Overture and Brahms’s Second Symphony. But the gem of the evening was the Violin
Concerto by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor - and if you have heard it and
puzzled over why it, too, is not standard repertoire, you would not be
alone.
This 1912 work is exquisitely beautiful. It is proud,
upbeat, tender, idealistic, memorable and deceptively tricky.
Comparisons to Dvorák tend to stem from the composer’s employment of
spiritual-like themes and a light-footed, syncopated finale, but really
the similarity stops there: Coleridge-Taylor had a strong individual
voice that perhaps reached its apex in this, one of his last works.
Half-African, half-British, much encouraged by his teacher Charles
Stanford and admired by Elgar, who gave him a helping hand by
recommending him for a commission, he has become something of a
figurehead composer for Chineke! and with good reason.
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