Samuel Coleridge-Taylor is best known for his cantata Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, which brought him international success as well as propelling his career at home in the UK success which was remarkable in stuffy late-Victorian England because of his mixed race and humble origins. Born out of wedlock to Daniel Taylor, a medical student from Sierra Leone, and Alice Holmans, Samuel was brought up by his mother and step-father, George Evans, a railway worker, in Croydon, south London. The three pieces recorded here were all composed during his time as a student at the Royal College of Music. They were destined to remain unpublished during his lifetime, and indeed for some ninety years following his untimely death from pneumonia at the age of only thirty-seven. Performing editions were eventually prepared from the surviving manuscripts which had remained in the RCM's archive in the early 2000s, offering modern performers and audiences the chance for the first time to savour exactly how precoc