Launceston Choral Society’s recent concert featured exclusively music by one of Britain’s unjustly forgotten composers, Samuel Coleridge Taylor, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of his birth in London.

Illegitimate and of mixed race, Coleridge Taylor was born into a working class musical family. He died very young in 1912 but in his short life produced sacred music, parlour and popular songs as well as beautiful piano pieces of which four were played with brio by David Green who also accompanied the choir on the organ using the orchestral score to bring a dazzling variety of musical effects to the main work of the evening.

This was “Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast” Coleridge Taylor’s setting of a section of Longfellow’s epic poem “The Song of Hiawatha” which enjoyed immediate and immense popularity with choirs and would have made its composer’s fortune had he not sold the rights to his publisher for 15 guineas. A song is demanded of Chibiabos, Hiawatha’s friend and musician, brought to life superbly at the concert by the tenor soloist Jonathan Wood who was more than equal to the soaring music written for the part. Finally there is a musical picture painted of the old storyteller, Iagoo known for “his immeasurable falsehoods”. The guests go home in their finery and Hiawatha and his bride are left alone.

The poem and the work have fallen out of fashion but the choir warmed to the works in rehearsals and gave a spirited and sensitive performance conducted by its musical director, Jonathan Mann, like Coleridge Taylor, a graduate of the Royal College of Music.

The society is extremely grateful to local business, David Parish Menswear, for selling the concert tickets. A retiring collection was taken for RNLI and raised nearly £320. Launceston Choral Society’s next concert will be its popular light summer concert on Saturday, July 12.