Chineke! Orchestra’s New Coleridge-Taylor Album

The Chineke! Orchestra acknowledging its audience at the conclusion of a performance (photograph by Zen Grisdale, courtesy of Crossover Media)

One week from today the Chineke! Orchestra will release an album of the music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor on their own Chineke! Records “house label.” Based in Great Britain, the ensemble is the first professional orchestra in Europe to be made up of majority Black and ethnically diverse musicians. All of the tracks were recorded in a variety of different venues in London.

Regular readers of this site probably know by now that Coleridge-Taylor has enjoyed a well-earned revival of interest from the recording industry. His music has been released on albums produced on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Given that Coleridge-Taylor was inspired by American literature and made three tours of the United States, it is not surprising that his legacy is now enjoying attention on both sides of the pond. However, the new Chineke! album offers a previously-overlooked account of this composer’s achievements. This involves the fact that his daughter Avril also made a career as both composer and conductor. As a result, one of her own compositions, “Sussex Landscape,” has been included on the new Chineke! release.

I did not feel particularly surprised that roughly half of the album consisted of compositions I had previously encountered on earlier recordings. Of much greater interest is the “social dimension” of Chineke!. There are seven compositions on this album. Among the first six, each is led by a different conductor. The final work is the Opus 2 nonet, which does not require a conductor! In other words the very treatment of leadership reflects a major departure from our expectations of how an orchestra performs. Mind you, because there is so much diversity across those seven compositions, I am not sure to what extent this album presents the listener with a diversity of conducting styles.

For my own part, I listen to that diversity in the hope that I shall eventually encounter this music in a concert setting. In other words I approach this album to cultivate familiarity. Whether selections differ by virtue of Coleridge-Taylor’s techniques as a composer or the stylistic differences of the conductors is, for better or worse, beyond my grasp as an attentive listener. On the other hand, regular readers probably know by now that my grasp is already firm when I encounter an ensemble that performs without a conductor!

Hopefully, as our concert scene works its way steadily back to business-as-usual, I shall have an opportunity to listen to Chineke! in one of San Francisco’s concert halls, after which I shall have a better grasp of that aforementioned “social dimension.”