Coleridge-Taylor’s The Song Of Hiawatha music review: Vibrant, soaring adventure
Coleridge-Taylor’s cantata trilogy is performed with buzzing energy and a folk-infused edge
‘The Song Of Hiawatha’ is an extraordinary piece. Anachronistically of its time, well over two hours long and, while once a regular on the concert platform it is now an outsider which needs an event like the Edinburgh International Festival to bring it back from obscurity. Placing it in cultural context, it was unusual to have two experts speak on stage before the music started. Uchenna Ngwe is a researcher on historical black British classical musicians and Anton Treuer is a professor of Ojibwe, one of the largest indigenous tribes of North America. This is the culture from which Longfellow’s poem takes its vivid imagery: the wigwams, turkey feather fans, medicine men, as well as the hero warrior himself and his wife, Minnehaha.
However, the cultural questions Coleridge-Taylor’s setting raises are addressed in more enlightened times; this is a cantata with a narrative of adventure, told with impressive clarity and conviction by Edinburgh Festival Chorus. Folksy, lush orchestral scoring was bright and expansive with Orchestre Symphonique De Montréal and conductor Rafael Payare. With both chorus and instrumentalists he moved it along at pace, never lingering long enough to overdose on twee Victoriana sentimentality.
Coleridge-Taylor’s The Song Of Hiawatha, reviewed at Usher Hall.