Coleridge-Taylor Piano Trio in E minor; R Clarke Lullaby and Grotesque for viola and cello; Elgar Piano Quintet in A minor, Op. 84
Kaleidoscope, I assume, is something a bit like Ensemble 360 in Sheffield, a group of musicians that can offer concerts with differing numbers and groups of instruments – here ranging from 2 – 5. The venue, St John’s Church, was not packed but comfortably full.
It was great to hear some of Coleridge-Taylor’s music. He had a terribly difficult early life and his tenaciousness to succeed must have been extraordinary. There have undoubtedly been some individual artists given less than their due and ignored because of their background, ethnicity, gender, status and so forth. and these need to be heard and re-assessed. I’m not sure Coleridge-Taylor in the end was one of them – if you look up the Proms Archive and check on performances of Scenes from ‘The Song of Hiawatha’, Op 30 you will find it regularly performed at the Proms from 1899 to 1959. Indeed I remember being rehearsed by our primary school music teacher in Hackney for months as a class to sing ‘By the shores of Gitchee Gumee’ in the late 50’s / early 60’s. I think it might have been a school musical…….Elgar thought highly of Coleridge Taylor and recommended him to The Three Choirs Festival when he was unable to undertake an offered commission. The real problem is that 1. Coleridge-Tay;or died young, and so there is a lot of unwritten music that might have raised his reputation significantly, and 2. that, as the Piano Trio in this programme shows, his music is not always very distinguished – in this case sub-Brahmsian in a pleasant sort of way, clever, well-constructed but pretty unmemorable. But it should certainly be heard and seen as being at least on a par with the Stanfords and Parrys of this world, particularly the big orchestral works like the Symphony and the violin concerto (I listened to the latter from the recent Proms telecast and much enjoyed it – and as a ‘late work’ it is much less obviously Brahms-influenced and you hear something of what Coleridge-Taylor’s own voice was like – how might things have been had he lived till his 70’s – into the 1950’s? What might have happened if he’d met Florence Price? if he’d met Gershwin?). Why his works eventually, from the early 60’s, fell out of favour as other contemporaries have done (cf Edward German) isn’t clear, but I am not sure that racial discrimination was any part of it – he was an Edwardian, I guess, and seen as a long way away from the music of the 60’s. (I am happy to be corrected if anyone thinks differently). Anyway, the Trio was well-played by the musicians
I’ve come across Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979) recently and this was a slightly spiky interesting set of pieces – slight but enjoyable (but again not something that is anything other than an occasional period piece)
The contrast between these two pieces and the Elgar is remarkable. Although I know the Elgar work from recordings (and I think I might have been organising performances of it in Egypt in 1984 with The Music Group of London, led by Hugh Bean) I haven’t heard it live for 40 years, and haven’t listened to it in a focused way for a very long time. By comparison with the other two works it is a towering masterpiece. Every bar counts and it has none of the ‘Palm Court’ overtones that to my mind the Violin Sonata sometimes has. It is tragic, joyful, unbearably moving in the slow movement and finally full of a kind of optimism which is resigned to disillusion. It is of course as every commentator mentions close in time to the composition of the Cello Concerto and to my mind equally as great a piece. The Kaleidoscope musicians played it wonderfully. There’s unease and disjuncture at the start of the first movement, followed by autumnal weariness – then a Brahmsian striding theme which is melodically strong enough not to sound too derivative, and which is then followed by a properly Elgarian melody, encompassing both yearning and jauntiness, swirling forward like some pre-War ballroom dance. The development section is passionate and troubled at the same time, and the melancholy gradually dissipates the energy – there’s an extraordinary collapse into a nothingness at the end of the first movement. The second movement has one of Elgar’s most profound melodies – absolutely gorgeous – which at first expresses a kind of resigned melancholy, very similar to the ‘cello concerto, and then moves to a series of passionate climaxes, with moments of Mahlerian negation in between. The Kaleidoscope people played it with more power and energy than the MP3 recording I’ve got by the Maggini Quartet and Peter Donohue. The third movement begins with quite an upbeat striding melody – again, very Elgarian – that gets transformed energetically at first and then subsides into the lassitude and despair of the first movement’s opening and closing. The passionate pre-war dance becomes ghostly and disembodied. Eventually the striding melody returns but somehow subdued at first – it later gathers strength, and there is a tumultuous ending. I listened to it again at home and was just as impressed. How have I missed this work’s qualities?
John's musical journey 