Born in London, the son of an English mother and a middle-class father whose ancestors were enslaved African Americans, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor is one of the few successful black composers in the annals of classical music. But his success came at a high price: He died at age 37 of pneumonia, almost certainly brought on by overwork and financial stress. Nevertheless, during his foreshortened career, Coleridge-Taylor won the respect and support of such titans of British music as Charles Villiers Stanford, George Grove, and Edward Elgar. His finest hour may have been in 1898, when his cantata Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, based on the Longfellow poem, was premiered at London’s Royal College of Music (RCM).
The Op. 2 Nonet is one of several chamber works that Coleridge-Taylor wrote as a pupil at the RCM in the early 1890s. Stanford, his teacher, was a follower of the German Romantics, and the Brahmsian flavor of the piece undoubtedly reflects his influence. (Coleridge-Taylor would cast his stylistic net wider in later works, in particular drawing on African and African American musical traditions.) On the other hand, the work’s instrumentation—oboe, clarinet, French horn, bassoon, violin, viola, cello, bass, and piano—is mildly idiosyncratic: The then-standard nonet ensemble substituted a flute for the piano, resulting in a less robust sonority.
Coleridge-Taylor inscribed the manuscript of his nonet with the words Gradus ad Parnassum, the title of a classic 18th-century musical treatise, suggesting that he considered his second-numbered opus a compositional exercise. Yet so confident and mature is the work, in terms of both taste and technique, that it’s easy to forget it was written by an untested teenager. For the most part, Coleridge-Taylor treats the winds and strings as distinct choirs, with the piano (his own instrument) mostly playing a supporting role. The prominence of the clarinet—it introduces the darkly urgent first theme of the opening Allegro energico—highlights the association with Brahms, whose late chamber masterpieces for clarinet also date from the 1890s. The Andante con moto, which moves from A-flat major to C major and back again, provides an effective lyrical respite, notwithstanding Grove’s reported comment that Coleridge-Taylor would “never write a good slow movement until he has been in love.” Both the Scherzo and the Finale are studies in contrasts—between smooth legato and crisp staccato articulations, duple and triple rhythmic patterns—and the work ends in bright, Brahmsian F major.
Apart from its early opus number, there is little to suggest that Britten’s 1932 Phantasy for Oboe Quartet is a student work, written while he was formally under the tutelage of John Ireland at the Royal College of Music and continuing to study privately with his iconoclastic mentor, Frank Bridge. Scored for oboe and string trio, the Phantasy followed hard on the heels of the composer’s equally precocious Sinfonietta for winds and strings. Britten was largely unimpressed by his teachers and fellow students at the RCM and spent much of his time in London’s concert halls, soaking up the latest music by modern masters like Stravinsky and Shostakovich. Many passages in his Op. 2 have a distinctly Stravinskyan flavor, spiced with a liberal dash of the Russian’s macabre humor. (The principal theme, an ever-so-slightly creepy march in dotted rhythm, may remind some listeners of Paul Dukas’s popular Sorcerer’s Apprentice.) First heard on a BBC Radio broadcast featuring the brilliant oboist Léon Goossens, the work augured well for the ambitious teenager’s nascent career.
The Phantasy’s single movement is structured like an arch, a kind of musical procession that’s first heard approaching in the distance, gradually swells and envelops us in its sonic embrace, and ultimately recedes into silence. The solo cello introduces the trudging march theme, muted and played sul tasto (on the fingerboard), which recurs throughout the piece—now in the foreground, now submerged beneath the music’s busy, glittering surface. The rhapsodic and highly virtuosic oboe part was made to order for Goossens—whom conductor Thomas Beecham had just enlisted to add luster to his newborn London Philharmonic Orchestra—and more than justifies the titular allusion to the intricately wrought instrumental “phantasies” of Renaissance England’s musical golden age. In years to come, Britten would mine the same rich vein of tradition in works like The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra and Lachrymae: Reflections on a Song of John Dowland, for viola and piano.
In his formative years, Britten gravitated toward open-minded, outside-the-box composers like Frank Bridge, William Walton, and Lennox Berkeley. During the 1930s, work in a government film-production unit brought him into contact with a cadre of left-wing writers and artists who shared his pacifist beliefs and disdain for bourgeois convention. Despite such early successes as the Op. 2 Phantasy, he continued to feel out of place on his native soil. When his friends W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood moved to New York in 1938, Britten quickly made up his mind to follow them. Accompanied by his lover, the tenor Peter Pears, he spent three productive years in Canada and the United States. It was there that Britten found his voice in works like the limpid song cycle Les illuminations, the genial folk operetta Paul Bunyan, the powerful Sinfonia da Requiem, and the radiant A Ceremony of Carols.
Written shortly after Britten returned to England in 1942, the Op. 31 Serenade highlighted the composer’s durable creative partnerships with Pears and British horn virtuoso Dennis Brain. The song cycle is one of the few musical masterpieces dedicated to a critic, Edward Sackville-West, who identified the common thread that links its constituent poems: “The subject is Night and its prestigia: the lengthening shadow, the distant bugle at sunset, the Baroque panoply of the starry sky, the heavy angels of sleep, but also the cloak of evil—the worm in the heart of the rose, the sense of sin in the heart of man. The whole sequence forms an Elegy or Nocturnal (as Donne would have called it), resuming the thoughts and images suitable to evening.” Britten’s settings of the words of six English poets, ranging from an anonymous 15th-century dirge to the Romantic effusions of Keats and Tennyson, are characteristically supple and sensitive. Framing the lyrics are a Prologue and Epilogue for solo horn, whose slightly out-of-tune natural harmonics do indeed sound like a distant bugle.
Shostakovich was a precocious 17-year-old pupil at the Leningrad (St. Petersburg) Conservatory when he wrote his first piece of chamber music in 1923. That work, the high-spirited Piano Trio in C Minor, Op. 8, was soon followed by this remarkable two-movement string octet, dedicated to a poet friend of the composer’s who died of tuberculosis in 1925. Shostakovich himself had recently recovered from the disease, which suggests that the work’s decidedly schizophrenic character reflects mixed feelings of grief and elation. Despite its outsize instrumentation, Op. 11 lacks the symphonic richness and confident mastery of Shostakovich’s later string quartets. Even so, the hallmarks of his mature style are already evident in the work’s insistent ostinato rhythms, wayward harmonies, and slithering chromatic motives.
The Prelude is a textbook essay in rounded ABA form. Slow, funereal music based on a lugubriously sighing figure gives way to an agitated midsection that contrasts spiky spiccato passagework with full-throated, Brahmsian sonorities. A high, agonizingly repetitive violin “cadenza” leads to a reprise of the opening dirge. Despite using scant musical material in the Prelude, Shostakovich is clearly flexing his creative muscles as he experiments with the transparent textures and extremes of register that would characterize much of his later music. The second piece is a slashing Scherzo that is less playful than manic, with its swooping glissandos, frenzied tremolos, and obsessively cycling rhythmic and melodic figures. In one extraordinary passage, the instruments mimic each other in canon, the eight voices entering one by one from top to bottom in a gloriously cacophonous pileup.
—Harry Haskell