Page 17 - Phil Great Collaborations March 2024 digital program book

PROGRAM NOTES

in the first violins playing in their highest register. Almost every measure of
the score is carefully marked (in the manner of Mahler), revealing Coleridge-
Taylor’s ear for expressive nuance and his love of dynamic and timbral
contrast. While his two-minute piano setting of the “bamboula” tune provides
a general harmonic framework for the work, the circumstances of its US
premiere led to one of his most virtuosic orchestrations.
After receiving the commission for Bamboula, the composer left England
on May 7, 1910, and traveled via Boston to New York. Stoeckel selected the
instrumentalists largely from the New York Philharmonic, and we can read
of their admiration for Coleridge-Taylor in print and in private letters. The
Stoeckels hosted the composer at their home, where he was inspired to
write several other suites and concertos. At the second Litchfield concert
of the 1910 season, Coleridge-Taylor, after an impressive standing ovation,
conducted Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast and The Death of Minnehaha. Arthur Mees
followed, conducting Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite and Lalo’s Symphonie
Espagnole (with violinist Fritz Kreisler). Coleridge-Taylor returned to the
podium to conduct the Norfolk Festival’s first hearing of his Bamboula:
Rhapsodic Dance. Even for the Litchfield County Choral Union, this was a
lengthy event.
The Waterbury American crowed: “The audience rises to greet with
thunderous applause a man of African blood. The color line at Norfolk
has been wiped out! ... Thus begins what is without doubt the greatest
performance of this work ever given on this continent.” In a June 21 letter to
his Croydon friend A. T. Johnson, Coleridge-Taylor called the string section
of the “superb” orchestra as “the pick of America” with eighteen first violins,
sixteen seconds, a dozen violas, a dozen cellos, and eight basses.” [The
experience was] “the delight of my life.”

RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS
Five Variants of ‘Dives and Lazarus’

Ralph (pronounced Rafe) Vaughan Williams was born in Down Ampney, Gloucestershire,
on 12 October 1872 and died in London on 26 August 1958. He is buried in Westminster
Abbey near his great-uncle Charles Darwin. Five Variants of ‘Dives and Lazarus’ is
a work for harp and strings. Sir Adrian Boult conducted the work’s premiere on 10 June
1939 with the New York Philharmonic in Carnegie Hall.
The Romantic generation of great British composers began with the
emergence of Edward Elgar (1857-1934), followed by a whole new generation
of talented musicians. The leading figure of this younger group of composers

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