The centrepiece event of RETUNE 2025
Oxford University Chorus and Players | Louis Benneyworth & Hattie Twigger-Ross, conductors
Tonight, we celebrate the musical world of the Coleridge-Taylor family. Avril, and her father Samuel (whose centenary we mark through our concert), were hugely significant voices in the British music tradition of the 20th century, with both contributing a hoard of orchestral, choral, and chamber music. A fascination with Longfellow's epic poem 'The Song of Hiawatha' underpins our musical narrative (indeed, Samuel Coleridge Taylor named his son Hiawatha), and we will explore both Avril and Samuel's settings of the poem. In fact, a festival existed during the late 1890s that was devoted to the sharing of Samuel's cantata 'Hiawatha's Wedding Feast', and so it feels fitting that this work is at the heart of this centrepiece concert.