A Samuel Coleridge-Taylor tribute

you I should like in my father centenary year to tell you something about some of the other music he wrote during his very short life several of his early compositions were performed while he was still a student at the Royal College of Music including his symphony in a minor and his clarinet quintet and then in 1898 the year after he left the college his first great opportunity arose through the kindness of Elgar who had been invited to write an orchestral work for the forthcoming three choirs Festival on April 17th that year Elgar sent the following letter from for Lee Marvin to herb Brewer the organist of Gloucester Cathedral I have received a request from the secretary to write a short orchestral thing for the evening concert I'm sorry I'm too busy to do so I wish wish wish you would ask coleridge-taylor to do it he still wants recognition and as far away the cleverest fellow going amongst the young men please don't let your committee throw away the chance of doing a good act this resulted in coleridge-taylor receiving the commission he wrote The Ballad in a minor opus 33 for full orchestra and after the first performance in the Shire Hall which he conducted himself in the following September he received an ovation the success of the a minor Bella and was followed two months later by hiawatha's wedding feast which was first performed at the Royal College of Music under the direction of Stanford in November 1898 this performance caused something of the sensation and henceforward Coleridge Taylor's future as a composer was firmly sealed he himself said but it was the curious names that first attracted him to Hiawatha but I believe there was also a deeper reason Vosges ark had produced his New World Symphony a few years before in 1893 and it is known that much of the inspiration for the symphony arose through Raja coming across a Czech translation of longfellows song of hiawatha my father was a champion of war Jacques and was greatly influenced by his music it is not unreasonable to suppose therefore that the admiration he had for VAR Jaques music and his close study of it stimulated his interest in the Hiawatha poem when asked which part of the wedding feast he liked best my father indicated the section towards the end son by the outers accompanied by tremolo strings so he told the strange adventures of Osio the magician from the evening star descended for sheer simplicity this is very beautiful I find it very moving a year after the wedding feast the second part of the trilogy the death of Minnehaha was performed at the north staffordshire festival in Handley this contains some of the most skillful writing of all three parts and is a splendid and powerful setting of the drama richly scored the music illustrates longfellows description of the long and dreary winter the famine and the fever the tragedy of the dying Minnehaha the sad figure of old Nokomis the anguish of hiawatha unforgettable is the lament huahin omen waha newman sang first by no comas the third part Hiawatha's departure was now completed and a whole trilogy was first performed by the royal choral society on the 22nd of March 1903 a finale is indeed full of inspired writing with powerful dramatic qualities there are of course various other choral works by my father which I should like to mention if time permitted but the one I must talk about is his setting of the poem by Alfred Noyes a tale of old Japan this was written in 1911 a few months only before his death it showed he had developed a new power of expression and of deep emotion at a Louisville Japan received its first performance by the London choral society at the Queen's Hall in December 1911 it success was such that it followed Hiawatha very closely in fact father liked to tailor those Upen better than Hiawatha he said the beauty of the poetry and imagery held me and I had to express it musically I have a special affection for this work for I remember it very distinctly from the time of its actual composition when as a child I stood beside my father at the piano listening to the music and watching him as he played he even asked me to sing some of the vocal lines when it came to introducing either they tenor or baritone part he joined with me in his own voice in this way I learned directly from him exactly how the music should be played and sung Coleridge Taylor's output of orchestral music was very considerable quite apart from the light of pieces such as petit Suite the Corsair his biggest purely orchestral work was the symphonic variations on a natural err which was first performed at a Philharmonic Society concept in the Queen's Hall under the composer's direction in 1906 the music inspired by his three visits to America showed the influence of the change in environment and freedom from personal worries as a result of these visits he wrote the orchestral rhapsody from the prairies the rhapsodic dance Bamboula and the Violin Concerto in G minor which are characteristic of the composer at his best the violin concerto was Coleridge Taylor's last major composition and he considered that it surpassed any previous work of his the first performance in this country took place understand reward with Arthur kettle as soloist at the Queen's Hall in London in 1912 shortly after the composer's death as one commentator has written his violin concerto represents him at the height of his powers this is not a work for the virtuoso soloist rather is the entire content shared equally between orchestra and solo violin again we see his masterly use of instruments in the team strings scored with melodies that haunt the memory so imbued with beauty as almost to move the listener to tears it is a mystery that social work should have been so ignored in the British concert hall you

Channel: Jack Gibbons

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Keywords: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Hiawatha's Wedding-Feast, The Death of Minnehaha, Violin Concerto

Id: FsYU8WfmIoA

Length: 17min 0sec (1020 seconds)

Published: Sun May 12 2013