Coleridge-Taylor: Nonet, Piano Trio, Piano Quintet — Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective provide fine advocacy

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912), the illegitimate son of a Sierra-Leonean medical student and an English woman, was one of the most successful British composers of his time. Elgar once called him “far away the cleverest among the young men,” and his works gained traction on both sides of the Atlantic. His rhapsodic dance Bamboula was performed by the leading orchestras of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Detroit, Saint Louis and Cincinnati. And although his oratorio Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, composed at the age of 23, was once a staple of amateur choral societies, his life was not plain sailing. A 1904 New York Times article was headlined “Visit of English negro composer emphasizes American prejudice”. The three pieces played by the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective are student works, written when the 18-year-old Coleridge-Taylor was a pupil of Dubliner Charles Villiers Stanford in London. The nonet for wind, strings and piano, solidly backward-looking in terms of its harmonic taste, is cheering and exuberantly tuneful in spite of its minor key. There’s an agreeable Dvořákian flavour to the piano quintet. The piano trio is tighter and more fiery, but oddly unsatisfactory, in spite of the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective’s fine advocacy.