When penning a memoir in her later years, Avril Coleridge-Taylor advised her readers to ‘never be discouraged by criticism even if it means waiting years to gain real recognition.’ She had her fair share of both criticism and waiting, and is only now moving into the limelight, three decades after her death. In her lifetime she was overshadowed by the better-known composers whose music is on this programme — her father, Samuel, and her contemporaries and inspirations Smyth, Elgar, and Vaughan Williams.

The Idylle for flute and piano is the earliest of Coleridge-Taylor’s works on today’s programme. She wrote it in 1920 for herself and the flautist Joseph Slater, to whom she was engaged. It is an unabashedly romantic work, written by a woman in love. By the time she composed Can Sorrow Find Me? in 1938, she was quite a different composer and woman, in the midst of a divorce from the man she eventually married, Harold Dashwood. This piece was originally a song. It has a melancholic, wistful tone, and a decidedly ambiguous conclusion. After appearing to end triumphantly on the text ‘Today I will be young and glad again’, Coleridge-Taylor brings back an altered version of the introduction and opening lines so the piece stops but does not end, closing with a question. The 1945 Romance is dedicated to a Dr. F. Bachner — perhaps the doctor who at the time was successfully treating her for an infected wound, almost certainly saving her life.

Avril adored her father, who was one of the most famous composers in Britain at the time of his death, when Avril was just nine. She remained forever devoted to his memory. ‘I write down…my own thoughts, and those which I believe are sent me by father’, she admitted in an early interview. His lyrical style, so apparent in this Quintet, is a clear influence behind Avril’s work. Besides Samuel, Elgar was the most significant musical figure in Avril’s life. She dedicated the second movement of her Piano Concerto to him. The Chanson de Matin is one of Elgar’s early works, in the tradition of “light music” that was hugely popular in England, and that Avril particularly enjoyed. Vaughan Williams, too, was a prominent presence — Coleridge-Taylor’s more romantic moments are in dialogue with his muted textures and constantly shifting harmonic language.

As for Smyth, Coleridge-Taylor felt that she was not just a musical inspiration, but an important personal role model, as a pioneering woman composer and conductor. ‘I felt as a woman composer I had a definite mission to accomplish in this world’, Coleridge-Taylor wrote, ‘so that her name, the first among our famous women musicians, should not be forgotten nor her work have been in vain.’ This energetic Piano Trio is an early work, dating from 1880. The ‘Scherzo’ contains Smyth’s characteristic quicksilver changes of mood, moving quickly between passages fraught with tension and joyful, expansive exclamations.

Leah Broad