Day 318
Coleridge-Taylor: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast
Anthony Rolfe Johnson
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and Chorus
Kenneth Alwyn
It is hard now to believe just how popular this piece one was. Between the wars Malcolm Sargent conducted regular performances - sometimes for days on end - at the Albert Hall with massed singers all dressed up in ‘red indian’ costumes. It was an standard work for amateur choral societies - my mum had a score in her small collection of music, though I don’t remember her performing it during the time that I went to her choral concerts.
Yet now it is almost forgotten and is a relic of a bygone era. I have to say that I thought it was a very disappointing peice. I can see why people liked singing it so much - there is a big role for the choir, the vocal parts are not that difficult and it makes a good noise when everybody is singing at the top of their voices. But musically it was very thin. The melodic material is unmemorable and Coleridge-Taylor’s harmonic palette is very limited. After a while I became heartily frustrated with the rather facile way that he moved up the keys in repetitive phrases in an attempt to build up the tension. He was a young man when he wrote this and probably had little by way of models to go on, but it seems impossible that this was once a highly regarded piece. The words don’t help. Longfellow’s use of made up Indian names now seems very uncomfortable and the continuous trocahic rhythm of the poetry see on gets on your nerves. It also seems to have inhibited any sense of rhythmic freedom in the music. It is all too foursquare.
There are two other Hiawatha pieces to go with this one - I am sure that i will be in no hurry to hear them. The past really is another country sometimes - it is just so hard to understand just what this piece had the position in British musical life for so long.
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