Coleridge-Taylor

Every year during the 1920s and ’30s, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s cantata trilogy Hiawatha was performed in London by thousands of amateur singers. Today, the composer’s other works are, at last, getting their deserved place in the sun. Chineke! Orchestra offers a generous selection of the Black British composer’s other works, including his beguiling African Suite (1898), inspired by the ideals of Pan-Africanism, the Othello (1909), complete with a heart-melting trumpet solo in “The Willow Song,” and the Nonet (1894), written during Coleridge-Taylor’s student days at the Royal College of Music. The album’s standout work, the Violin Concerto in G Minor, receives a deeply affecting performance from Elena Urioste and Chineke! under the empathetic direction of Kevin John Edusei. They reach top form in the work’s rhapsodic slow movement, shaping its exquisite melodies and emotional fluctuations with spellbinding sensitivity. The composer’s daughter Avril Coleridge-Taylor was a fine composer in her own right—as a delightful album bonus, her atmospheric orchestral suite Sussex Landscape here receives its world premiere recording.