Coleridge-Taylor - Hiawatha's Wedding, Petite Suite de Concert, The Bamboula.

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Coleridge-Taylor - Hiawatha's Wedding, Petite Suite de Concert, The Bamboula.

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Coleridge Taylor - Hiawatha's Wedding, Petite Suite de Concert, The Bamboula. Philharmonia (Sargent, Weldon) & Bournemouth SO (Alwyn)
2005 | Classical | FLAC and mp3 | 1CD | No booklet, link to score | Split rar archives | FLAC 275 MB | mp3 78 MB

A remastered version of Sir Malcolm Sargent and the Philharmonia Orchestra's famous 1962 recording, accompanied by two similarly excellent performances of some of the composer's less-well known work.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was born on August 15, 1875 in Croydon, a suburb of London, England. His mother was an English woman named Alice Hare. His father was Daniel Peter Taylor, a native of Sierra Leone who trained as a physician at King's College, London. After graduating he found his race was a barrier to maintaining a medical practice in the United Kingdom. As a result he returned to Africa permanently around the time of Samuel's birth. He is not known to have had any contact with his son.

Young Samuel was raised by his English mother and stepfather, but his musical education was overseen by Col. Herbert A. Walters, who belonged to the church choir in which the boy sang. Samuel also studied violin with a local musician as a child. He enrolled at the Royal college of Music in 1890 as a student of Violin.

Two years later he switched to composition and was taught by Charles Villiers Stanford. Coleridge-Taylor wrote his Symphony in A Minor in 1896, we are told by Lewis Foreman in the liner notes of the world premiere recording, Classico 684 (2006). Critic Jonathon Woolf of Music Web International writes of the work: “His characteristic gift for melodic beauty is always present.”

Coleridge-Taylor rose to prominence in 1898, the year he turned 23, on the strength of two works. The first was his Ballade in A Minor. It was commissioned for the prestigious annual Three Choirs Festival at the suggestion of the British composer Edward Elgar (1857-1934). The piece was a critical and popular success.

The composer's second major composition of 1898 was his musical Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, for which he is best known. The work is a setting of verses from Song of Hiawatha by the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He conducted its premier to great acclaim. It was staged hundreds of times in the United Kingdom alone during the next 15 years.

Samuel married Jessie Walmisley, a pianist and classmate, on Dec. 30, 1899. The publicity surrounding Hiawatha's Wedding Feast created a huge demand for tours both within the United Kingdom and abroad. Among the most important for the composer's career were three tours of North America in 1904, 1906 and 1910.

The first concert of the 1904 tour was in Washington, D.C. The Coleridge-Taylor Society, an African American choir, appeared with the United States Marine Band, with the composer at the podium. During his stay in the capital Coleridge-Taylor visited President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House.
- AfriClassical.blogspot.com