Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective - Hahn: Piano Quintet, Songs & Piano Quartet - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Oscar winner Anne Hathaway (Interstellar, Les Miserables) stars as Franny in SONG ONE, a romantic drama set against the backdrop of Brooklyn's vibrant modern-folk music scene. After Franny's musician brother Henry (Ben Rosenfield, Boardwalk Empire) is injured and hospitalized in a coma following a car accident, Franny returns home after a long estrangement and begins to use his notebook as a guide to how his life has evolved in her absence.

Hailed by The Times for it's 'exhilarating performances', the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective was dreamed up in 2017 by Tom Poster and Elena Urioste, who met through the BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists scheme. The Collective operates with a flexible roster which features many of today's most inspirational musicians, both instrumentalists and singers, and it's creative programming is marked by an ardent commitment to celebrating diversity of all forms and a desire to unearth lesser-known gems of the repertoire. This ethos is clear in their repertoire selection for this their début recording. The Piano Quintet is one of Amy Beach's better-known works, which the KCC collectively fell in love with during a residency at the Cheltenham festival. Composed in 1907, the work reflects the strong influence of the music of Brahms. Florence Price famously claimed to face 'two handicaps - those of S*x and race', and much of her music remained unpublished at the time of her death. Additionally, a significant quantity of her manuscripts had disappeared without trace. It was not until 2009 that a cache of them (including two lost symphonies) was discovered by property developers in the attic of an abandoned house in Illinois - including the score for the Piano Quintet in A minor that receives it's world première recording here. Although characteristically conservative in it's late-romantic idiom, the piece celebrates Price's African American heritage with echoes of spirituals and hymns, and the popular juba stomping dance rooted in the slave plantations of the Deep South. Between these two piano quintets sits Samuel Barber's early Dover Beach, a setting of Matthew Arnold's famous poem that has remained one of the best-known works in the voice-and-quartet repertoire.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor is best known for his cantata Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, which brought him international success as well as propelling his career at home in the UK - success which was remarkable in stuffy late-Victorian England because of his mixed race and humble origins. Born out of wedlock to Daniel Taylor, a medical student from Sierra Leone, and Alice Holmans, Samuel was brought up by his mother and step-father, George Evans, a railway worker, in Croydon, south London. The three pieces recorded here were all composed during his time as a student at the Royal College of Music. They were destined to remain unpublished during his lifetime, and indeed for some ninety years following his untimely death from pneumonia at the age of only thirty-seven. Performing editions were eventually prepared from the surviving manuscripts - which had remained in the RCM's archive - in the early 2000s, offering modern performers and audiences the chance for the first time to savour exactly how precocious the creative talents of the teenage Coleridge-Taylor had been. The Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective has consulted the manuscripts and corrected numerous inaccuracies in these editions. Described by The Arts Desk as 'a sparky, shape-shifting ensemble of starry young musicians', the Collective has been thrilling audiences with it's charismatic programming and outstanding musicianship.