The Illinois Symphony’s 2024-25 season in Bloomington-Normal kicks off Saturday at Illinois State University’s Center for Performing Arts. And it's a program of firsts:
Maestro Taichi Fukumura takes the podium for the first time as Illinois Symphony's new music director. A crop of new musicians has joined the orchestra, too. It's also the Illinois Symphony debut for violinist Braimah Kanneh-Mason, who plays Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Violin Concerto. The program, titled Festive Fanfare, also features works by fellow British composer William Walton and Antonin Dvorak.
Unusually, Kanneh-Mason and Fukumura had not met before this week. The later hails from Nottingham, England, where he grew up in a musical family with six siblings. In 2015, the family gained popularity outside classical music circles by appearing on Britain’s Got Talent.
“It was definitely a reluctant choice that we made to go on the show,” Kanneh-Mason said in an interview for WGLT’s Sound Ideas. “When we were first presented with the idea of going on it, our first thought was, absolutely not. In hindsight, it was something that was a learning experience and something that was new and unique—and also fun as well.”
Coleridge-Taylor was deeply influenced by America and is perhaps best known for The Song of Hiawatha, a set of three cantatas based on a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem. The Violin Concerto was the final composition Coleridge-Taylor finished before he died, published in 1912 and written for an American violinist, Maud Powell, who was born in Peru, Illinois, and took violin lessons in Aurora before moving to Europe at age 13. She was the niece of Illinois Wesleyan University professor and geologist John Wesley Powell.
“I personally wasn’t aware of Coleridge-Taylor until relatively late in my musical education,” said Kanneh-Mason. “It’s very unusual that a composer who Elgar called a genius, a composer who wrote a piece of music [The Song of Hiawatha] preformed time and time again at the Albert Hall—there are many stories like this where you have women or non-white composers who history tends to erase.”
Coleridge-Taylor’s parents were English and Krio, his father hailing from Sierra Leone. Like Kanneh-Mason, he had a musical family; his two children also went on to careers in classical music.
“But I think the wonderful thing about being a composer is you can essentially be immortal if people continue to play your music.”
Walton’s Spitfire Prelude and Fugue opens the evening, a short work originally published in 1942 for the score to The First and the Few. Walton was spared from military combat by agreeing to write music for British war propaganda.
“These three pieces have so much interlinking happening across them,” Fukumura said. “The Samuel Coleridge-Taylor actually has a melodic link to Dvorak. The two pieces are unrelated, but coincidentally, musically, it’s a very similar melodic experience but musically they go off in very different directions.”
The program closes with Dvorak’s Symphony No. 8, which the ISO has not performed in at least 15 years.
“Both Dvorak and Coleridge-Taylor are interested in this exploration between folk music and classical music,” said Kanneh-Mason. “Dvorak has this way of writing that when a melody comes, even though you might be hearing it for the first time, you feel as though you’ve heard it before. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor has that nostalgic feel in the way he writes.”
Coleridge-Taylor’s work has enjoyed relative popularity among today’s concert repertoire and represents the Illinois Symphony’s demonstrable effort to infuse the season with more diverse composers than ever before.
“We are really excited about these pieces,” said Fukumura. “And we want to open the doors and open our arms and say, come join us. Because this is really great stuff.”
The Illinois Symphony Orchestra performs Festive Fanfare, works by William Walton, Antonin Dvorak and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 19, at Illinois State University's Center for Performing Arts.
