In 1946, Avril Coleridge-Taylor returned to Brighton Dome to conduct a programme that included her own Piano Concerto in F minor. Twenty years earlier, she had appeared there as a singer. Now she led the Coleridge-Taylor Symphony Orchestra, bringing her own composition into the same programme as music by her father, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Dvořák and Tchaikovsky.

Those two appearances give Brighton a place in the story of a musician who worked as a singer, pianist, conductor and composer. Her Sussex connections also reach beyond the concert hall, into the countryside that inspired her music and the coastal town where her life ended.

Returning to Brighton Dome

Avril’s earlier appearance at the Dome came in 1926, when she sang Minnehaha in her father’s Hiawatha cantatas. The Mixed Museum’s research records a performance with a chorus of 300, conducted by Percy Taylor.

Her return in 1946 brought a different responsibility. She was directing an orchestra and presenting a major work of her own. These appearances belong within the wider history of Brighton Dome and Mandela Hall, where music, race and public life meet. The Southern Syncopated Orchestra’s 1921 residency offers another chapter in that venue’s Black musical history.

Jessie Coleridge-Taylor with her children Hiawatha (standing) and Avril (seated beside her). Published in The Bookman , 1915. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

A musical education and a name of her own

Born Gwendolen Avril Coleridge-Taylor in 1903, she was the daughter of Samuel and Jessie Coleridge-Taylor. Her father died in 1912, while she was still a child.

Music remained part of her upbringing. Trinity Laban’s archive-based account records that she received a scholarship to Trinity College of Music in 1915 and studied there for three years, concentrating on piano and composition.

She later worked professionally as Avril. Music historian Leah Broad describes the adoption of her middle name as part of a deliberate fresh start after the breakdown of her marriage. Her orchestral work To April belonged to that new beginning.

The family name brought recognition, but it also invited comparisons. A listener who arrived expecting another Samuel Coleridge-Taylor might miss what Avril was trying to do. Her Brighton concerto appearance gives us a useful starting point for hearing her as a composer in her own right.

Sussex in her music

Her orchestral piece Sussex Landscape , dated 1940 in the Resonus recording catalogue, offers another way into her relationship with the county.

The title might suggest a peaceful view of fields and hills. In her accompanying recording notes, historian Leah Broad reads the work through the threat of war and the fear that a loved countryside could be destroyed. She describes a troubled opening surrounding a quieter central passage, with the darker music returning at the end.

That interpretation gives the title a particular weight. Sussex becomes somewhere vulnerable, rather than simply somewhere beautiful. Her score adds something to the county’s history that a plaque or a concert programme cannot provide: an artistic response to a place under threat.

Brighton Dome’s current programme associates Avril with Buxted in East Sussex. Her later life also took her to Seaford, where historian Jeffrey Green records that she died in a nursing home in 1998. The town’s heritage trail identifies Stone’s House in Crouch Lane as the place where she died and includes her in its blue-plaque history.

A life that needs careful telling

Avril’s professional difficulties included racial discrimination. Broad’s research documents her exclusion from work in apartheid South Africa and repeated difficulties securing the BBC’s interest in Britain. She also used the male pseudonym Peter Riley for some compositions.

Her political judgements need equal care. Seaford’s heritage account describes her as initially supportive of, or neutral towards, South Africa’s racial segregation. It also records that she lost the right to work there when the authorities recognised her African ancestry.

These accounts should sit together. Experiencing racism does not establish a consistent record of opposing it. Her achievements can be recognised without smoothing away the decisions that complicate her story.

Hearing Avril again

The recovery of her music has depended on people returning to the manuscripts. Writing in 2022, Broad described finding around fifty additional compositions among material held by Avril’s family. Some pieces had survived in scattered pages that needed to be brought together before they could be understood or performed.

A recording released by Resonus in November 2025 brought together pianist Samantha Ege, the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor John Andrews. It includes the Piano Concerto and Sussex Landscape , giving listeners a practical route beyond the biographical outline.

For Brighton and Sussex, that is a good place to return to Avril. She sang here, conducted here and made the county part of her music. Listening to her work allows those connections to be heard as well as recorded.

Sussex Landscape at Brighton Dome

Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra’s programme for 23 January 2027 includes Avril Coleridge-Taylor’s Sussex Landscape. View the current concert programme and booking information.

Concert details checked 7 November 2026.

Sources

• The Mixed Museum: Coleridge-Taylor at Brighton Dome
• Trinity Laban: Avril Coleridge-Taylor
• Leah Broad: Cataloguing Avril Coleridge-Taylor
• Resonus Classics: Piano Concerto and Orchestral Works
• Leah Broad: accompanying album notes
• Jeffrey Green: Gwendolen (Avril) Coleridge-Taylor
• Seaford Heritage Walks: blue plaques

Image credit: Brighton Dome, photograph by Paul Gillett, via Geograph/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0. Modern view, 2011.