Coleridge-Taylor: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, Op. 30 No. 1

The name of Hiawatha's Wedding Feast cantata may not mean much to today's music lovers, apart from a few enthusiasts, but you have to imagine that up until the last war, before the work and its composer fell into oblivion, this superb score was one of the most famous and frequently performed choral pieces in the United Kingdom. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, then barely twenty-three, had suddenly burst onto the scene in a British musical milieu that was still somewhat conservative, and caused a sensation with this fresco inspired by the native American myths put into words by Longfellow (a poem that is said to have inspired Dvořák when writing his “Symphony from the New World”!) The first part, Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, is particularly famous, and was first recorded in 1930 under the baton of Sir Malcolm Sargent. The conductor, who was particularly fond of this work, repeated the experiment at the head of the Philharmonia Orchestra some thirty years later to give a reference version, made available for the first time for the celebrations around the composer’s 150th anniversary.