The Illinois Symphony kicks off its 2024-25 season in Bloomington-Normal this Saturday at the Illinois State University’s Center for Performing Arts, showcasing a program filled with firsts.
Maestro Taichi Fukumura will conduct the orchestra for the first time as the new music director. Additionally, the orchestra has welcomed a number of new musicians. Violinist Braimah Kanneh-Mason will make his Illinois Symphony debut, performing Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Violin Concerto. The concert, titled “Festive Fanfare,” will also feature compositions by fellow British composer William Walton and Antonin Dvořák.
Interestingly, Kanneh-Mason and Fukumura had not met prior to this week. Fukumura hails from Nottingham, England, where he grew up in a musical family with six siblings. In 2015, the Kanneh-Mason family gained widespread recognition after appearing on Britain’s Got Talent, which Kanneh-Mason described as a reluctant yet ultimately rewarding experience.
Coleridge-Taylor was significantly influenced by American culture and is best known for The Song of Hiawatha, a trio of cantatas based on a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem. The Violin Concerto was Coleridge-Taylor’s last completed work, published in 1912 for American violinist Maud Powell, who was born in Peru, Illinois, and took violin lessons in Aurora before moving to Europe at age 13.
“I wasn’t aware of Coleridge-Taylor until relatively late in my musical education,” Kanneh-Mason admitted in an interview for WGLT’s Sound Ideas. “It’s unusual for a composer whom Elgar called a genius—who wrote a piece of music (The Song of Hiawatha) performed numerous times at the Albert Hall—to be overlooked in history, especially non-white composers and women.”
Coleridge-Taylor’s mixed heritage—his parents were English and Krio, with his father from Sierra Leone—parallels Kanneh-Mason’s background, as both came from musical families.
“The wonderful thing about being a composer is that you can essentially achieve immortality if people continue to play your music,” he reflected.
The evening opens with Walton’s Spitfire Prelude and Fugue, a short piece originally published in 1942 for the score of The First and the Few. Walton avoided military service by agreeing to compose music for British war propaganda.
“These three pieces are interlinked in fascinating ways,” Fukumura stated. “The Samuel Coleridge-Taylor piece actually shares a melodic connection with Dvořák’s work. While they are unrelated, their melodies create a similar experience, despite diverging in different directions musically.”
The program concludes with Dvořák’s Symphony No. 8, which the Illinois Symphony has not performed in at least 15 years.
“Both Dvořák and Coleridge-Taylor explore the relationship between folk and classical music,” Kanneh-Mason noted. “Dvořák has a way of writing melodies that feel familiar even on first hearing, and Coleridge-Taylor’s style evokes a sense of nostalgia.”
Coleridge-Taylor’s work has gained popularity in today’s concert repertoire, reflecting the Illinois Symphony’s commitment to featuring a more diverse array of composers this season.
“We are really excited about these pieces,” Fukumura said. “We want to open our doors and arms to everyone and invite them to join us, because this music is truly exceptional.”
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