Ballade in A minor, Op. 33

The Ballade is a single continuous stretch of music, roughly ten minutes, built from two ideas that alternate and eventually collide.

It opens without preamble: a hard-edged, galloping theme in the strings, marked energetic but not too fast, pushed along by short stabs from brass and drum. The rhythm has a limp built into it, an accent landing where you do not expect one, and that lurch is what makes the tune recognizable every time it comes back. Coleridge-Taylor keeps the volume high and the orchestra full, so the first two minutes feel like a chase already in progress.

Then the pressure drops. A broad, singing melody arrives, first in the strings, marked tranquil and very expressive, and the scoring thins out to let woodwind lines curl around it. This is the passage listeners tend to remember, warm and unhurried, with harmonies that keep sliding somewhere slightly unexpected before settling.

From there the two characters trade places. Fragments of the galloping opening creep back underneath the lyrical tune, the music tightens, and the orchestra gathers for a final run at the first theme. The close is fast, loud and short: no long wind-down, just a hammered finish.

In 1898 the composer Edward Elgar was asked to write a short orchestral piece for the Three Choirs Festival at Gloucester. He declined and recommended instead a 22-year-old Royal College of Music student, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, describing him as far and away the most gifted of the younger British composers. The Ballade in A minor was the result, first performed at Gloucester in September 1898 with the composer conducting. It was a success, and it arrived in the same extraordinary year as Coleridge-Taylor's cantata Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, which made his name across Britain and, soon after, the United States. He toured America three times and was received at the White House by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1904. Coleridge-Taylor died in 1912, aged 37. The Ballade slipped from the repertoire for much of the twentieth century and returned to programs in recent decades, often opening a concert.