Chineke! Orchestra: Coleridge-Taylor album review — flowing melodies

This has been a big year for Chineke! Orchestra, Europe’s first orchestra of majority black and ethnically diverse players. There has been Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at the BBC Proms, a tour to the Lucerne Festival, and now the first recording on its own label in partnership with Decca.

It will have been an easy choice to start with Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Since it was founded in 2015, Chineke! has included music by black composers in each of its concert programmes and the unsung Coleridge-Taylor is handsomely rewarded here with a double-CD set.

Some of these recordings were taken from Chineke!’s live concerts in London and the orchestra’s playing holds up well under detailed scrutiny. Conductors and soloists come and go, but the recording quality is admirably consistent.

As a composer active in England in the first decade of the 20th century, Coleridge-Taylor almost inevitably falls under the shadow of Elgar, but there is also much of the songfulness of Dvorak about his music. The melodies flow and flow.

With the possible exception of a rather naive early Nonet, every work here is a delight. Some, like the Violin Concerto, played by Elena Urioste, are weighty, intended to impress. Others, including the Othello orchestral suite and the better-known Ballade in A Minor, overflow with descriptive imagination. An African Suite sounds more European, for all its African heritage. The Petite suite de concert and the Romance in G are almost salon music, but skilfully written and so tuneful. What is there not to like?

★★★★☆

‘Coleridge-Taylor’ is released by Chineke! Records/Decca