Clarinet Quintet in f-sharp minor, Op. 10

• Coleridge-Taylor wrote this piece in 1895, while he was a student at the Royal College of Music, studying composition with Charles Villiers Stanford.¹
  • Stanford’s teaching was influenced by Brahms, which is likely why Coleridge-Taylor was interested in the genre of clarinet quintet. 
  • Stanford was so impressed with this composition that he showed it to Joseph Joachim (famous violinist and close friend of Brahms). 
• This piece premiered at the Royal College of Music during the mid-1890s.²

“Mr. Taylor’s themes are his own, and very interesting and unconventional the majority are, while the ease with which he handles the difficult form, the freedom and artistic balance of his part-writing, and, even more, the the variety and originality of his rhythms, are quite remarkable in one so young.”

From a review of Coleridge-Taylor’s Clarinet Quintet in The Musical Times (1895)³

• This work was first published in 1906, by Breitkopf und Härtel in Leipzig.⁴

1. Stephen Banfield and Jeremy Dibble, and Anya Laurence, “Coleridge-Taylor, Samuel,” Grove Music Online (2003), accessed January 26, 2022,  https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-1002248993.
2. Jeffrey Green, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: A Musical Life (UK: Routledge, 2011), 34.
3. Quoted in Ibid.
4. “Clarinet Quintet, Op. 10 (Coleridge-Taylor, Samuel),” IMSLP, accessed January 26, 2022, https://imslp.org/wiki/Clarinet_Quintet%2C_Op.10_(Coleridge-Taylor%2C_Samuel).