New at Noon: December 31, 2025

Dr. Samantha Ege’s new record with the BBC Philharmonic and conductor John Andrews is an album of Avril Coleridge-Taylor’s orchestral music.  She notes, ” I’m playing her Piano Concerto in F minor, which she wrote in 1936. Avril was the daughter of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a hugely influential and incredibly talented Victorian-era composer of mixed English and Sierra Leonean descent whose life was cut so short. Avril was so incredibly proud of her father. She dedicated the third movement of her piano concerto to him. The whole piece is so redolent of that quintessential English pastoralism, but she has her own voice. Her sense of harmonic color is so striking. There’s an underlying tension that reflects the anxiety of the interwar era she was writing in.”     Listen New Year’s Eve at Noon to hear the performance NEW at NOON on 90.9 WGUC. (photo by Jason Dodd)