Chamber Works
for Oboe, Clarinet, Bassoon, French Horn, Violin, Viola, Cello, Contrabass, and Piano
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) was an Anglo-African musician. After studying composition with Stanford at the Royal College of Music, Coleridge-Taylor went on to lead a distinguished career as a composer, conductor, and teacher. His music encompasses orchestral, chamber, and vocal works, and was admired both in England and the US, where Coleridge-Taylor counted among his friends and supporters some of the most important black figures of the day, such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, with whom he collaborated closely on several projects; Frederick Loudin, director of the Fisk Jubilee Singers; the writer W.E.B. Dubois; and Booker T. Washington, who wrote the Preface to Coleridge-Taylor’s Twenty-Four Negro Melodies (1905). Coleridge-Taylor was appointed professor of composition at Trinity College of Music in London in 1903, and also at the Guildhall School of Music in 1910. His frantically busy schedule of activities may have contributed to his death from pneumonia in 1912.
for Flute, Clarinet, Viola, Cello, Contrabass, Piano
Cipriani Potter (1792-1871), one of the most prominent British musicians of his day, was widely known as a composer, pianist, conductor, and teacher. He studied in England, Germany, and Austria, and made the acquaintance of Beethoven, who thought well of Potter's skill as a composer. Potter was renowned for his skill at the pianist and gave the English premieres of a number of Mozart's piano concertos as well as Beethoven's First, Third, and Fourth piano concertos. From 1822 Potter taught at the Royal Academy of Music, and was its principal from 1832 to 1859. He was a prolific and well-regarded composer.
Clarinet and String Quartet version
Thomas Ryan (1827–1903) was arguably the most important clarinetist in nineteenth-century America, yet today he is virtually unknown. He gave the first documented American performances of several important pieces in the clarinet’s repertoire. He was also himself a composer, authoring numerous clarinet works, some of which still survive but have never been published or performed since Ryan’s lifetime; one of these, the Ballade et Polonaise is offered here for the first time, in versions for clarinet and piano and for clarinet and string quartet.
Born in Templemore, County Tipperary, Ireland, Ryan emigrated to Boston, and made his permanent home there. In his early Boston years Ryan made a living performing in theater orchestras and on concerts given by various musical societies. By 1849 he had become a founding member of the Mendelssohn Quintette Club, which became one of the most important chamber music groups in America in the second half of the nineteenth century. It toured, at first just throughout New England, but later crossed the length and breadth of the US. In 1881, their reputation having grown immensely, the Mendelssohn Quintette Club was invited to tour Australia and New Zealand, stopping to give concerts in Hawaii on the return trip.