Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912)
Ethiopia Saluting the Colours (March), Op.51 (1902)
Solemn Prelude, Op.40 (1899)
Zara’s Earrings Op.7 (1894)
Idyll, Op.44 (1901)
Ballade for Violin and Orchestra in D minor, Op.4 (1894)
Entr’acte 1 from the incidental music to Nero, Op.62 (1906)
Romance in B for string orchestra after the Clarinet Quintet, Op.10: II Larghetto affettuoso (1895)
Rebecca Murphy (soprano), Ioana Petcu-Colan (violin)
Ulster Orchestra/Charles Peebles
rec. 2025, Foyle Foundation Hall, Belfast, UK
Text included
SOMM Recordings CD0713 [68]

SOMM has taken advantage of the 150^th Anniversary of the birth of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor with this generous and unusual collection of his orchestral music. Five of the seven works are labelled as “first recordings” and the other two are hardly familiar. The music is entrusted to the skilled hands of the Ulster Orchestra conducted with sensitivity by Charles Peebles. The leader of the orchestra Ioana Petcu-Colan steps forward from her front desk duties to be the confident and assured soloist in the biggest single work here: the Ballade for Violin and Orchestra in D minor Op.4.

The life and work of Coleridge-Taylor have been given far greater attention in the last decade or so than it was in the preceding century after his death aged just 37. Without a doubt, Coleridge-Taylor was a very able, indeed gifted, composer who showed precocious talent as a student. This is evidenced by the confidently brilliant early chamber works written (and often published) while he was at the Royal College of Music under Charles Villiers Stanford. As I quoted in my enthusiastic review of these works back in 2022 Stanford wrote to the famed violinist Joachim; “[Coleridge-Taylor has a] quite wonderful flow of invention and idea… altogether the most remarkable thing in the younger generation that I have seen and he knows his counterpoint.” Remember that at the time Stanford wrote this Coleridge-Taylor’s near-contemporaries were Gustav Holst, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Thomas Dunhill, Walford Davies, William Hurlstone.

The issue – which in some way by accident or design this well-planned programme highlights – is whether that remarkable youthful gift translated into major music of enduring quality and individuality. Part of the problem that faced many composers who were not born into private wealth (Holst and Hurlstone from the above list but add any number more; Brian, Foulds – initially even Elgar) was that the publishing and performing royalties system in the UK was predicated against the composer. Coleridge-Taylor sold the rights to his most significant/famous work Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast outright for fifteen guineas even though it then sold hundreds of thousands of copies and was performed endlessly. It was the plight of his family after his death that led in no small part to the founding of the Performing Rights Society which oversees payments to creative artists to this day. Many composers before the Society was founded were forced to produce large quantities of music, whether for the salon, stage, end of the pier or wherever simply to generate enough one-off sales to constitute an income. That said the “Establishment” supported Coleridge-Taylor with commissions for the Three Choirs Festival and elsewhere better than many other equally financially compromised colleagues.

The other characteristic which meant popularity during his lifetime was that Coleridge-Taylor’s natural melodic gift – which was substantial – leaned towards the sentimental. Coupled with a conservative harmonic sense and musical form this led to a body of work that rarely challenged the musical conventions of the day. Even the works that draw on his African heritage rarely seem liberated by that heritage. Instead, they tend to be tastefully handled arrangements – no sense of an “heir and rebel” here. The programme opens with an extended [9:50] march Ethiopia Saluting the Colours.  This is not a kind of “Crown of India”-like Empire March but instead a reference to Walt Whitman’s poem of the same name from his Drum-Taps collection.  Ethiopia is a former slave who sees hope for a better future in the liberating army of the North.  The actual march clearly seeks to emulate the success of the previous year’s Pomp and Circumstance.  There are odd little echoes of Sousa, too, in a couple of piccolo figurations as well as the melodic shape of some of the themes.  As ever, the orchestration is wholly effective – if somewhat generic.  The recording captures extremely well the opulent swagger of the writing although – sensibly – Peebles keeps the basic tempo moving forward.

The Solemn Prelude Op.40 of 1899 was one of the aforementioned Three Choirs commissions.  Jeremy Dibble in his informative liner describes it as “sharing that ‘nobilmente’ spirit that is characteristic of the big symphonic slow movements by his older contemporaries (Parry, Stanford and Elgar)… stirring in its gravity and elegiac pathos…”  Certainly for a composer in his early twenties, this is a confident and impressive piece although as the above quote implies, a work that emulates what has gone before rather than breaking any boundaries.

This is certainly true as well in the dramatic scena Zara’s Earrings Op.7 which is another student work – first performed at the RCM under Stanford in 1895. This receives another convincing performance with soprano Rebecca Murphy bright-toned and energetic delivering a slightly one-dimensional text by John Gibson Lockhart which is titled in the text printed in the liner “A Moorish Ballad”. Lockhart is hardly a famed poet although Parry did adapt part of one poem he wrote in his late and great Songs of Farewell. Coleridge-Taylor adds little flecks of ‘Janissary’ music with triangle and cymbals but overall the strophic form of the original poem is rather anti-dramatic and has more echoes of a kind of Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. Consider for a moment that 1895 was when La Boheme was being written, Falstaff had been completed 2 years earlier and Leoš Janáček began Jenůfa.  It is of genuine interest to hear this work but the sense of the composer’s entrenched conservatism is reinforced.

The Idyll Op.44 is another Three Choirs work and was written in the wake of the huge acclaim afforded the Hiawatha trilogy. Whether he was pressed for time is not clear, but Coleridge-Taylor chose to rescore and expand the slow movement of his Op.8 Symphony – Lament – Larghetto affettuoso and rename it as well as assigning a new opus number. They are recognisably the same work although the Idyll is weightier. This difference is clear when comparing the performance of the movement in the symphony from Douglas Bostock with the Aarhus SO on Classico. Aside from any additional material, the Bostock is a lighter more flowing reading and Peebles is broader and nobler – perhaps consciously revisiting the mood (and success?) of the Op.40 Solemn Prelude. Both versions/approaches work well in their respective contexts.

Alongside his training as a composer Coleridge-Taylor was an accomplished violinist so no surprise that solo works for his instrument feature throughout his output. The Ballade for Violin and Orchestra in D minor Op.4 is the longest work on the disc – 15:26 in this performance. This is a completely different work from the orchestral Ballade in A minor that has been recorded by both the RLPO on Argo and Chineke! on Decca. SOMM have been pipped to the post with another premiere here by a performance that was reviewed here on MWI as recently as September. The piano and violin version of the work was recorded for Koch in 1990 [licensed to Alto in 2022] by violinist Michael Ludwig. Coleridge-Taylor gave the same title to a third work Op.73 which is again quite different. As mentioned here the soloist is Ioana Petcu-Colan who is technically very impressive but I did wonder if her quite forceful and dramatic performing style, while very accomplished, was ideally suited to this primarily lyrical work.  By that measure alone I found Ludwig’s lighter tone and more fluid style somehow more appropriate.  I have not heard the recent Avie release. As a work this has the feel of a concerto first movement with perhaps Bruch or Dvořák as the clearest influences. Again, it is hard to fault the work which for a student work is again notably confident and effective and certainly attractive even if hardly original or mould-breaking. This was another work which the young composer was able to have published (in the violin and piano version) as early as 1895 although technically it lies significantly beyond the ability of most domestic or salon players.

The single most striking work on the disc is the Entr’acte from the Incidental music for Nero Op.72 written in 1906 for a new play staged by Herbert Beerbohm Tree.  The manuscript score can be viewed on IMSLP – remarkably for a ‘pit’ orchestra this is written for a full Romantic orchestra – double wind, four horns and full brass (including tuba), percussion strings and even a harp.  Dibble mentions that Coleridge-Taylor enjoyed both the generous (100 guinea) fee and the opportunity to hear a significant score performed every night.  The manuscript of the full suite of movements – Dibble mentions seven but the RCM/IMSLP archive manuscripts total six – at a cursory glance suggests a work well-worth exploring in full.  Incidental music was a valuable source of income (perhaps a conducting fee could be negotiated alongside any composing…) for many composers at this time.  Other collections feature selections from Othello primarily but this is the kind of genre; illustrative, colourful, melodically attractive that genuinely plays to Coleridge-Taylor’s strengths.  Again, these qualities are underlined in the recording and playing here of richness and warmth in an attractive acoustic.

Repurposing music for wider exposure and hopefully extra financial gain was a pragmatic solution exploited by many composers.  The disc is completed by a string arrangement by the composer of the slow movement of his early Clarinet Quintet Op.10 – here titled Romance in B.  As Dibble writes, the sheer assuredness of the original quintet when first played at the RCM in 1895 astounded listeners.  Returning to the Quintet (also part of the Koch/Alto disc mentioned above) the reasons for that astonishment are instantly evident – arguably Coleridge-Taylor’s most individual and impressive work.  Yes, of course shades of the Brahms quintet are self-evident but at the same time Coleridge-Taylor finds an intensity that very often in later works would trade melodic appeal for depth of expressive emotion.  The string orchestra transcription works very well indeed – to the point that you wonder why this version is not much wider known and played – the performance here is another premiere recording.  Coleridge-Taylor died aged just thirty-seven.  Although he left a substantial body of work, much of that was created as a matter of financial expedience rather than artistic imperative.  So judging his enduring musical ‘worth’ has to be based on what exists not what might have been.  My feeling is that his very real talent was curbed by an embedded musical conservatism that ultimately prevents his music from being considered as more than high quality but second tier.

However, this remains a genuinely valuable, very well played, well recorded and carefully presented disc.  A special mention is due here for the work of the late Patrick Meadows – whose name seems wholly absent from this production.  Meadows was responsible over a period of many years for the editing and creating of new performing editions of many of Coleridge-Taylor’s scores including several performed here.  Simply put, without his many hours of labour involved, this disc would not be possible.

Nick Barnard

Previous review: Jonathan Woolf (October 2025) and John Quinn (November 2025)

Buying this recording via the link below generates revenue for MWI, which helps the site remain free