Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: Early Chamber Works album review — expert performances

For the best part of a century Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s name was known, if at all, for his choral work Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, and even that only enjoyed a shadowy presence. Although music students knew of its existence, performances were few and far between.

Now Coleridge-Taylor’s music is undergoing an overdue re-evaluation. The three works on this disc — the Nonet Op 2 “Gradus ad Parnassum”, the Piano Trio and the Quintet Op 1 — went unheard throughout the 20th century and performing editions were only made in the early 2000s.

They could not hope for more expert performances. The Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, formed by violinist Elena Urioste and pianist Tom Poster in 2017, operates a flexible roster that includes outstanding musicians such as clarinettist Matthew Hunt, horn-player Ben Goldscheider and cellist Laura van der Heijden.

The three works they have chosen all date from the 1890s, when Coleridge-Taylor, who had an English mother and a Sierra Leonean father, was a composition pupil at the Royal College of Music in London. As his teachers noted at the time, the young man’s music overflowed with colour, rhythm and, above all, tunes.

The melodies flow throughout. With a deferential nod towards Brahms and his idol Dvořák, who had championed African American composers on his visit to the US, the Nonet offers a marvellously rich outpouring of ideas. That freshness carries through to the Quintet, though the Piano Trio is unconvincingly terse. What a loss to music Coleridge-Taylor’s early death at the age of 37 was.

★★★★☆

‘Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: Early Chamber Works’ is released by Chandos