Samuel Coleridge-Taylor - Heart & Hereafter (Elizabeth Llewellyn; Simon Lepper)

Information

Composer: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

• (01) 6 Sorrow Songs, Op. 57
• (07) Southern Love Songs, Op. 12
• (10) 7 African Romances, Op. 17
• (17) 5 Fairy Ballads: No. 3, Big Lady Moon
• (18) 5 Songs of Sun and Shade (selection)
• (21) Faust, Op. 70: No. 4, A King There Lived in Thule
• (22) A Lament
• (23) 6 Songs, Op. 37 (selection)
• (25) Life and Death

Elizabeth Llewellyn, soprano

Simon Lepper, piano

Date: 2021

Label: Orchid Classics

https://www.orchidclassics.com/releases/orc100164-elizabeth-llewellyn/

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Review

Soprano Elizabeth Llewellyn’s debut recital album consolidates the favourable impression she made on Martyn Brabbins’s superb Hyperion recordings of Vaughan Williams’s A Sea Symphony (10/18) and Elgar’s Caractacus (4/19). This time, she and her exemplary accompanist, Simon Lepper, lavish their considerable skills on the extensive song output of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912).

Bearing a dedication to the composer’s wife, the 1904 collection entitled Six Sorrow Songs comprises settings of poetry by Christina Rossetti; it’s a finely crafted sequence, the climactic ‘Too late for love!’ conveying a plangent intensity which is matched here by the haunting ‘A Lament’ (a later treatment of the same poet’s ‘A Dirge’, also set by John Ireland in his 1918 songbook Mother and Child).

For his Op 17 African Romances Coleridge-Taylor chose seven poems by the African American poet and novelist Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906); the two had met in 1896 and this was the first of their joint enterprises. Charming as these offerings are, however, they are arguably eclipsed by both the wholly enchanting ‘Big Lady Moon’ – No 3 of the Five Fairy Ballads (1909), which set poems for children by the Sierra Leonean Kathleen Mary Easmon (1891-1924) – and the memorable ballad ‘A king there lived in Thule’, written in 1908 for the precocious Sydney-born Marie Lohr (1890-1975), who was then appearing on the West End stage in the role of Marguerite in an adaptation of Goethe’s Faust.

We’re also treated to three items each from the Op 12 Southern Love Songs (‘Minguillo’ is especially fetching) and Songs of Sun and Shade (‘incredibly intimate and sensual’, as Llewellyn astutely observes in the booklet), as well as two of the Six Songs, Op 37 (‘Canoe Song’ and ‘You’ll love me yet’, the latter after Robert Browning). First published two years after Coleridge-Taylor’s cruelly early death, ‘Life and Death’ – to words by Jessie Adelaide Middleton (1864-1933), known to connoisseurs of supernatural fiction for her Ghost Book Trilogy – brings proceedings to an arresting close.

An irresistible anthology, in sum, and there’s lots more by this remarkable figure for Llewellyn and Lepper to explore should the opportunity arise. Excellent sound and presentation, too.

-- Andrew Achenbach, Gramophone

More reviews:
https://www.classical-music.com/reviews/choral-song/heart-hereafter-coleridge-taylor/

https://www.allmusic.com/album/heart-hereafter-collected-songs-of-samuel-coleridge-taylor-mw0003507652

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/may/27/heart-hereafter-songs-of-samuel-coleridge-taylor-review-elizabeth-llewellyn-simon-lepper

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Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (15 August 1875 – 1 September 1912) was an English composer of Sierra Leone Creole descent who achieved such success that he was once called the "African Mahler" by New York musicians. He was particularly known for his three cantatas based on the epic poem, Song of Hiawatha. Coleridge-Taylor also composed chamber music, anthems, and the African Dances for violin, among other works. The Petite Suite de Concert is still regularly played. Coleridge-Taylor was greatly admired by African Americans, with public schools were named after him in Louisville and Baltimore.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Coleridge-Taylor

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Elizabeth Llewellyn (born 1974 in London) is an English opera singer. She showed interest in music at an early age and chose to pursue singing, but had to give up at 22 due to consistent illness which affected her voice. Return to music after ten years, Llewellyn joined the Glyndebourne Festival Opera Chorus and had her debut with the English National Opera in 2010. Since then she has performed many roles such as Mimi (La Bohème), Countess (The Marriage of Figaro), Micaela (Carmen), and Amelia (Simon Boccanegra). On 13 October 2019, Llewellyn played Bess in her Metropolitan Opera debut.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Llewellyn

https://elizabethllewellyn.com/

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