This new set of Coleridge-Taylor’s choral pieces on a smaller scale is a welcome addition to the catalogue for several reasons. First, the first CD, of church music written between 1891 and 1901, bears witness to the fact that the composer’s talent was, like many of his contemporaries, nurtured by his experience and early technical training in an ecclesiastical environment. Four of the anthems on this recording were composed and published by the time he was 17 and a student working under the guidance of Stanford at the Royal College of Music. In thee, O Lord (1891), O ye that love the Lord and Lift up your heads (both 1892) radiate the influence of Stainer, but one suspects that the model of Stanford’s more instrumental style was gradually superseding it, as is suggested by the lilting, dancelike triple metre of The Lord is my strength, which Stanford used so effectively in his Magnificat in B flat (by then well established in the repertoire). The Morning and Evening Service in F, much admired by Elgar, who described it as ‘fresh and original’, was published in 1899 though it dates from around 1897 (when Elgar saw the score). Perhaps a little foursquare in places and lacking in textural variety (where more counterpoint might have enhanced the sense of contrast), it nevertheless exudes a Romantic rhetoric and harmonic ambience unfamiliar to Anglican ears accustomed to the sounds of Noble, Ireland, Harwood and Charles Wood. Some of the chromatic interpolations in the Te Deum and the Benedictus, for example, are striking and unusual, as is the songlike lyricism of the Magnificat and its triumphant ‘Gloria’. The more symphonic By the waters of Babylon (1899), written during the same year as The Death of Minnehaha, the second of his Song of Hiawatha trilogy, exudes a greater structural confidence in its wider variety of gesture and solemnity, as does the longest and most dramatic of his anthems, Now late on the Sabbath Day (1901), written for Eastertide, which resembles a verse anthem with its extended central solo.

While the church music and the Three Short Pieces for organ evince Coleridge-Taylor’s apprenticeship and early maturity, the second CD’s part-songs belong, with the exception of By the lone sea shore (1901), to the last five years of his life, cut short at 37 by pneumonia. Revealing a catholic taste in poetry, these secular miniature essays bear the hallmarks of a more assured hand. The eight-part Sea Drift, Op 69, dubbed a ‘rhapsody’, is a remarkable narrative setting of Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s stormy nautical verse (recalling the similar tragic character of his choral rhapsody Meg Blane of 1902). The later eight-part setting of Thomas Hood’s The Lee Shore (1911), another maritime landscape, stands out for its luminous conclusion. A poem by his close friend, the young Ghana-born Kathleen Simango, gave rise to the wistful Whispers of Summer (1910), a sentiment that also haunts Thomas Campbell’s The Evening Star and the rich sonorities of Christina Rossetti’s Summer is Gone (both 1911). Also of 1911, The Viking, here sung with organ accompaniment, was, by dint of its patriotic tone and its references to the building of the Royal Navy’s dreadnought battleships, one of the composer’s most popular works. Perhaps the most personal of the part-songs, however, is the short but deeply poignant setting of Shelley’s Song of Proserpine (1912), which Parry used that same year in his ballet Proserpine.

These are committed and colourful performances by the London Choral Sinfonia and its sympathetic director Michael Waldron, and the church music in particular gains a good deal from James Orford’s sensitive but also gutsy organ accompaniment (especially in the Morning and Evening Service). This is interesting and neglected music which is certainly worth rediscovery by choirmasters and choral directors on the lookout for new repertoire.