SRCD.317 STEREO DDD Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

SAMUEL COLERIDGE-TAYLOR (1875-1912) Violin Concerto

1 Legend (Conzertstück) Op. 14 (1897) (7’12”) Legend 2 Romance in G Op. 39 (1899) (9’35”) Violin Concerto in G minor Op. 80 (1912) (32’53”) Romance 3 1st Movement: Allegro maestoso – Vivace – Allegro molto (12’14”) 4 2nd Movement: Andante semplice – Andantino (8’33”) 5 3rd Movement: Allegro molto – Moderato (12’06”)

JULIUS HARRISON (1885-1963)

6 Bredon Hill – a rhapsody for violin and orchestra (1941) (11’54”) (61’37”) Lorraine McAslan, violin London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Nicholas Braithwaite Julius Harrison Lorraine McAslan London Philharmonic Orchestra The above individual timings will normally each include two pauses. One before the beginning of each movement or work, and one after the end. Bredon Hill ൿ 2007 The copyright in these sound recordings is owned by Lyrita Recorded Edition, England © 2007 Lyrita Recorded Edition, England. Made in the UK Nicholas Braithwaite LYRITA RECORDED EDITION. Produced under an exclusive license from Lyrita by Wyastone Estate Ltd, PO Box 87, Monmouth, NP25 3WX, UK ime has dealt cruelly with Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. A century ago T(November 1898), his setting of Longfellow’s Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast began its progress round the musical world, making its composer as famous a figure as Sullivan and, at the time, more so than Delius, Vaughan Williams or Holst. But after his death at the early age of thirty-seven, his music suffered a decline in popularity, relieved only by the dramatised performances of Hiawatha given each year in the 1920s and 1930s by the Royal Choral Society. Coleridge-Taylor was born 15 August 1875 in the London district of Holborn. He was the offspring of a union between a young white woman and a black medical student from Sierra Leone, who returned to Africa shortly after qualifying. The young Coleridge-Taylor sang in a church choir and was taught the violin. His talent was noticed by his choirmaster, Colonel Herbert Walters, who paid for him to enrol as a student of the Royal College of Music. Here, he studied composition under Charles Stanford, for whom he produced a succession of chamber works (including a fine Clarinet Quintet) and a symphony. And it is as a composer of instrumental music in classical forms that he www.lyrita.co.uk seemed likely to make his mark, but the unprecedented success of the Hiawatha cantata led to a stream of choral commissions from the festivals which for a dozen Notes © 2007 Lyrita Recorded Edition, England years diverted him from this path, and probably contributed to the chronic Cover: Composer photographs courtesy of the Lewis Foreman collection. overwork which undermined his constitution, leaving him an easy prey to the pneumonia which caused his death on 1 September 1912. Legend, Violin Concerto & Bredon Hill It is arguable that Coleridge-Taylor produced some of his best work while Rec ording location and date: 10-12 January 1994, Watford Town Hall. Recording Producer: Andrew Keener working as a student under the discipline of Charles Stanford. The Legend Recording Engineer: Tryggvi Tryggvason (Conzertstück) of 1896-97 is an instance of this. A lyric tone poem in ternary form, its delicacy of orchestration - particularly in the opening with muted strings, harp Romance Rec ording location and date: 20 January 1994, Watford Town Hall. and woodwind arabesques - seems to anticipate the mature Delius. Stanford Recording Producer: Andrew Keener conducted its first performance on 15 February 1897 with fellow-student Marie Recording Engineer: Tryggvi Tryggvason Motto as soloist. Two years later (1899) found Coleridge-Taylor inundated with commissions. WARNING Copyright subsists in all Lyrita Recordings. Any unauthorised broadcasting. public The Romance in G shares its principal melody with the slow movement of a performance, copying, rental or re-recording thereof in any manner whatsoever will constitute an infringement of such copyright. In the United Kingdom licences for the use of recordings for public Sonata in D Minor for Violin and Piano published posthumously in 1917. Which performance may be obtained from Phonographic Performance Ltd., 1 Upper James Street, London, W1F 9DE 2 7 Very little music exists in isolation, and Harrison’s rhapsody - no exception - really came first? The suspicion must be that the sonata is an early work from seems to make responses to the music of Butterworth in Shropshire and Vaughan which the composer salvaged the best idea. This was his habit, when pressed for Williams in Gloucestershire. But Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending is but a time. The treatment of the melody in the Romance is altogether more impressive starting point for Harrison, whose lark is merely incidental, and whose rhapsody is than in the Sonata, and the second idea, treated throughout in double-stopping, considerably more complex than that of V.W. It is scored, too, for a much larger contrasts well with it. The composer himself played it in May 1899 at the Salle orchestra than is used by V.W., including as it does full brass, cor anglais, harp and Érard, London in a joint recital with his future wife Jessie Walmisley. bells in addition to the usual strings and wind. In this, it is much nearer to Coleridge-Taylor made three visits to the USA; the first two at the invitation Butterworth’s A Shropshire Lad, and it is the remembrance of Butterworth that of the Washington coloured community, which honoured him with near-heroic may have suggested not only the climactic apex of the work, but also the harmonic status. The third (1910) was to conduct his newly composed Rhapsodic Dance: language; in particular the manner in which unexpected minor chords are used. Bamboula, and the first two cantatas of The Song of Hiawatha with the New York This work - a small masterpiece - has received few concert performances of Philharmonic Orchestra at the prestigious Litchfield Festival, Norfolk, late. It may well be that the sensitive orchestral writing, plotted by Harrison with Connecticut. This festival was the brainchild of the philanthropic Carl Stoeckel. Mahlerian precision, requires the detailed rehearsal impracticable in the concert Attending the festival that year was the distinguished American violinist Maud hall these days. Powell, who suggested to Stoeckel that he commission Coleridge-Taylor to write a GEOFFREY SELF concerto for her to play. The Violin Concerto had a troubled history. Stoeckel hoped that Coleridge- Taylor might incorporate some well-loved old American tunes and, ever ready to oblige, the composer used the spiritual Many Thousand Gone for his slow movement, and Yankee Doodle for the finale. He submitted the violin and piano version to Powell and Stoeckel, who were unenthusiastic about the last movement. Fortunately for them, he saw its banality for himself, and re-wrote the entire concerto, omitting the borrowed tunes. He asked them to destroy what he had sent, but they had admired the original slow movement, which certainly is a thing of great beauty. They therefore kept it, and used it as an encore when the re-written work was given its first performance at the Litchfield Festival in June 1912. Even then, the concerto’s problems were not over, as the full score and parts sank with Titanic. A further set reached Litchfield only just in time. At the first performance, a portrait of the absent composer stood on the platform. Maud Powell shared the applause with it. The composer made some revisions for the concerto’s first (and as it turned out posthumous) performance in England given by Arthur Catterall at the Proms.

6 3 Like his models Dvorak and Schubert, Coleridge-Taylor was an impulse weighty opening theme of the concerto seems likely to send the work to a grave composer, whose approach to composition was rhapsodic, and whose work stands conclusion. But the impressive peroration effects a triumphant transformation. on the inspiration of its melody. There is, nevertheless, a strong structure to the This is a light concerto, and perhaps difficult to categorise. Maud Powell, the three movements, which are linked cyclically, in that the principal ideas of the first work’s dedicatee, understood this point well: “I wish somebody would suggest two movements recur towards the end of the third. some name besides that of ‘concerto’ to be attached to a composition which is not For his first movement, Coleridge-Taylor retains a basic sonata form, too serious in its nature... it is not quite a full-grown concerto, nor is it yet a suite”. although he modifies it in the recapitulation by making only the briefest reference to his second subject. This subject - dotted and dancing - is Schubertian in style. Julius Harrison was born at Stourport, Worcestershire, 26 March 1885. After The opening tutti, which recurs throughout the movement just as it would have in study at the Midland Institute, Birmingham, he achieved an early success in 1908 Mozart or Beethoven, is altogether more portentous, as if heralding a work of great when his Cleopatra won the prize offered by the Norwich Music Festival for a weight; but in fact this concerto is to follow the grace of Mendelssohn rather than dramatic cantata, (one of the judges was Coleridge-Taylor). It seemed that the gravitas of Brahms. Harrison might become primarily a composer, but he was diverted into A violinist himself, Coleridge-Taylor’s writing for his instrument is always conducting: for Beecham’s various operatic enterprises, for the Scottish Orchestra idiomatic, and frequently original. The first movement development is a case in and, over the years 1930-1939, as Director of the Hastings Municipal Orchestra. point, where the soloist, playing on the sonorous G and D strings, actually provides Composition inevitably took second place. When the gradual onset of deafness a bass for the woodwind figures dancing aloft. The cadenza, too, is the more brought his conducting career to an end he was released for the creative work striking for being accompanied. Elgar, in his B minor Violin Concerto, had pointed which he saw, with hindsight, was his true calling. the way two years before with ‘thrummed’ pianissimo strings. Coleridge-Taylor The ripest fruits of this late harvest were the large-scale settings of the Mass uses a single drum-roll. (1947) and the Requiem (1957), and Bredon Hill. Harrison completed his The slow movement has two contrasting ideas - one in 6/8 time and the other Rhapsody on 22 June, 1941. Its twelve and a quarter minutes, in the composer’s in 4/8. They alternate with one another throughout, to form a simple rondo, whose precise timing, encompass a variety of moods, and a climax of considerable power. central episode cunningly unites both ideas. That, at any rate, is what happens in But overall the music expresses the spirit of A. E. Housman’s well-loved lines dry technical terms. But this replacement movement is an exquisite musical which grace the title-page of the score: poem; perhaps a love-poem which hearks back to Onaway, Awake, Beloved in Here of a Sunday Morning Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, the work which had established him. My love and I would lie, The finale is also a species of rondo; but one which is subject to Coleridge- And see the coloured counties Taylor’s modifications to the rondo stereotype. If the Andante semplice had And hear the larks so high reflected Mendelssohn, the finale seems to have an affinity with Dvorak. Certainly, About us in the sky. its gentle syncopations have been suggested by those of the corresponding movement of Dvorak’s Violin Concerto. The rondo episodes momentarily cloud the prevailing geniality with a certain wistfulness, and the dramatic intervention of the

4 5 COLERIDGE-TAYLOR: VIOLIN CONCERTO… McASLAN / LPO / BRAITHWAITE LYRITA HARRISON: BREDON HILL SRCD.317 D DD 7 .31 ”) 7 end. EO CD ’3 the (8’33”) (9’35”) (7’12”) ER 1 (12’14”) (12’06”) (11’54”) (32’53”) SR after (6 12) ST ne o and 75-19 ork, w (18 or a 63) 19 str movement lin 885- molto che te each (1941) (1 f o vio g Or N yrita L innin Allegro OR YL A -T eg an, ai thw by b – e sl om fr SO (1912) onic ai th chestra or nse m 80 Br UK (1897) e befor lice and by Andantino ivace V McA ne p. – har as O – 14 l l 3WX, ned e conducted O UK Moderato ses. ow violin hi in xclusive – au the HARRI or is e p NP25 P cho Op. n in o in for a (1899) ) tw S de Ni semplice m maestoso molto Ma 39 dings cor under don Lorra G include RIDGE COLE e r Monmouth, LIU in ach e rtstück Op. rhapsody 87, Lon o England. sound Allegro Andante Allegro EL JU a oduced Pr G rt n, Box – nze normally O in these ll ngland ON. ditio P E E wi in (Co Hill DITI ce Ltd, E ings d Conce tim yright n ded cor l Edition, SAMU n i state op Movement: don ua d Movement: Re RDED Movement: c E man e ivid iol ege CO The ind 2nd 1st d 3r e Br L Ro V d cor yrita L RE stone ve Re 07 bo 6 4 5 2 3 1 a 007 a 20 Wya it 2 A RIT e © by ൿ Th yr L Y L

COLERIDGE-TAYLOR: VIOLIN CONCERTO… McASLAN / LPO / BRAITHWAITE LYRITA HARRISON: BREDON HILL SRCD.317