Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, ca. 1905, photographer unknown (Public domain)
The name Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) often appears on lists of African-descended composers, but in truth I don’t know that I’d ever heard any of his compositions, certainly not in live performance. Have you, Reader?
A new CD has just appeared from Azica Records called
UNCOVERED Volume 1 that is entirely dedicated to his music, and at 79 minutes’ duration, it’s a generous sampling. It contains three early works for string quartet,
Fantasiestücke (Fantasy Pieces) op. 5 from 1895, and two quintets: one in G minor with the quartet and piano, op. 1 from 1893, and the other in F sharp minor with clarinet, op. 10 from 1906.
El ciclo Jóvenes Intérpretes del Conservatorio Superior llega a su ecuador
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Concierto del Conservatorio Superior de Navarra el martes 16
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Pure Bliss – rediscovering a great forgotten composer
Can new recordings of this neglected British composer’s music finally put an end to our ignorance of Bliss?
Unbridled originality: Sir Arthur Bliss
Credit: Bettman
The two volumes of the piano music of Sir Arthur Bliss, played with great perception and sensitivity by Mark Bebbington and available on the Somm label as part of its heroic mission to present lesser-known pieces by British composers, has precipitated me back into an exploration of the work of this curate’s egg of a composer. I have always thought Bliss missed out on the renown he deserved, even though he ended up, for the last 22 years of his long life (he died in 1975, aged 83), as Master of the Queen’s Musick, in succession to Sir Arnold Bax. Unlike many who have held that role, he made quite a success of it. He found composing easy, and never seemed to have any trouble doing it to order.
Claude Debussy in 1908
I sometimes get the nagging feeling, listening to piano trios, that there’s something missing. Something in the middle of the texture, perhaps? An emollient voice tempering the soloistic onslaught? Or am I simply a viola player envious because of my instrument’s absence from such a popular chamber music genre?
If the viola has suffered from being overshadowed by the violin and cello, Claude Debussy is one composer who helped it find an identity elsewhere. His Sonata for flute, viola and harp, completed in the autumn of 1915, may not have been the first time these instruments made a threesome together – there is a 1905 Terzettino by Théodore Dubois, the director of the Paris Conservatoire who warned students off attending the premiere of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. And Arnold Bax almost certainly wrote his Elegiac Trio of 1916 at around the same time, unaware of Debussy’s Sonata, which the composer himself only got to hear in December 1916. Bu