Avril Coleridge-Taylor: Piano Concerto & Orchestral Works (CD Review)

by Ryan Ross

Samantha Ege, pianist; John Andrews, conductor; BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. Resonus RES10374

In her liner notes for this recording, Leah Broad describes Avril Coleridge-Taylor’s struggles to make headway as a composer. “Never be discouraged by criticism even if it means waiting years to gain real recognition,” the ambitious daughter of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor apparently told herself, working up the resolve not to quit “because some critics have written scathing remarks” about what she considered to be her “masterpiece.” This masterpiece is not named. But if it was one of most works recorded here, I’m inclined to count myself among her critics. Truth be told, it’s just another instance in a recurring pattern: feeling sympathy for a neglected composer’s difficulties while being pressured by overzealous advocates to overrate the music on account of them. Broad claims that Coleridge-Taylor had a “powerful and unique voice,” and that maybe this music “will speak better to twenty-first century listeners than to her contemporaries.” But what seems truly powerful—and what probably speaks most to contemporary listeners—is Coleridge-Taylor’s plight as an artist trying to succeed in a white male world. It is a plight that elicits well-deserved sympathy. Yet once we submit her music to scrutiny apart from this sympathy, we are forced to admit that her detractors probably had a point.

The main problem is that Coleridge-Taylor has some appealing materials but poorly sustains them over extended spans. Her efforts come off better when she doesn’t have to do this—when we have melodies and not much else. The best example on this disc is the four-minute Valse Caprice. It consists of a strong main theme (with a nice tag motive!), a couple of contrasting themes in the middle, and a reprise of the initial theme. For this piece Coleridge-Taylor adopts a late-Romantic ballet style entirely appropriate to the task. A bit of excessive harping on the second middle theme right before the A-theme reprise is a minor flaw, but overall this is solid stuff.

However, the other short selections here are not cast in an assumed ballet idiom, and some begin to betray issues that are more fully visible in the larger works. Coleridge-Taylor’s natural tendency is toward simple, square-cut themes. Unfortunately, once these have been stated and lightly varied, they usually exhaust their potential quickly. This is especially clear in the Sussex Landscape set. The second and third numbers succeed largely because they are short—two to three minutes—and rely on one or two ideas with minimal need for connection or development. But the first number runs close to six minutes, and here we begin to notice the afore-mentioned weaknesses. It opens with a frail theme built around a prominent half-cadence, an idea that is then tediously belabored, particularly given how rarely the music strays from the tonic. Bland variations on this opening gesture occupy nearly the entire span of the piece, while the contrasting ideas introduced in the middle are too close in flavor to offer meaningful relief.

The two In Memoriam miniatures tell a similar story. The second operates well enough simply because it is the shortest item on the disc, and little happens in its approximately 2 minutes beyond straightforward exposition of material. The other, In Memoriam – to the R.A.F., runs about four and a half minutes and feels at least a minute too long. Once again, Coleridge-Taylor overworks a slender main theme in the outer sections—especially at the outset—in ways that it ill tolerates. The lovely clarinet counter-melody in the middle stands out largely because it is comparatively spared such treatment.

In most of the longer works the seams are obvious. Coleridge-Taylor’s predilections for half-cadences and monotonous thematic sameness within a constricted tonic framework persist, but are now compounded by stalling devices: timpani-led tutti interruptions (resembling attempts to kick-start an engine) and cadenza-like passages that appear whenever the music seems to run out of forward momentum. In To April, the compulsive half-cadenzing seems to go on forever, so that we’re actually thankful for the harp passage that follows, despite the choppy continuity. Following this is a nice-ish theme that gets repeated with little variation. It was barely good enough to state once. The Comet Prelude (inspired by an airplane ride) goes on for even longer—almost 11 minutes. Perhaps the piece would have earned its genre title more if it were shorter, and the gentle secondary theme in the middle didn’t completely wear out its welcome. Curiously, From the Hills presents a step up from the other extended compositions here. It is not entirely free from their issues, but it does manage them more effectively. The sudden adoption of an English pastoral style seems to make a difference, as the nature of the content itself slightly eases Coleridge-Taylor’s difficulties in treating it.

With the Piano Concerto we are back in a stock late-Romantic idiom, close to Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff. Such stylistic conservatism lies at the center of several critiques of Coleridge-Taylor I have seen, but they miss the point. The workmanship is what is objectionable here, not the style. All of the problems already identified factor in, though the first two movements contain some genuinely pleasant material. What sinks the concerto most of all is its finale. A wisp of a theme opens the movement and is forced to do absurdly heavy labor for more than two minutes. An almost equally insubstantial secondary idea follows in an extended cadenza-like area before the opening gesture returns prior to a sweepingly climactic peroration. But the materials are too slight, and the connective tissue too feeble, for the structure to hold. The result is almost painful to listen to. It is hard to imagine anyone with a genuine critical capacity hearing it without wincing.

I’m not a formalist: I often rail against formalism. But while I listen to this music it makes me a formalist almost against my will. When basic elements of compositional craft are missing or compromised, this deficit comes to define the musical experience. Which brings us back to the nature of the overall project. Toward the end of the liner notes we’re told the following: “[Leah] is the founder of Unheard Heritage, a project with John Andrews and Resonus Classics to record great, forgotten music for new audiences. This is the project’s second disc...” I’m sorry, but “great music?” If I agree that it should have been recorded, I nonetheless strongly object to the idea that it’s great. Why the frequent overclaiming with ventures like these? I think we know why, and the reasons ultimately have little to do with the music itself. I acknowledge that Avril Coleridge-Taylor struggled to overcome obstacles she ought not to have faced. But this does not mean that she wasn’t in the end someone whose compositional ambitions (including an obvious wish to follow in her father’s footsteps) ran ahead of her abilities. Both things can be true, and no amount of pie‑in‑the‑sky advocacy will persuade me to pretend otherwise.