Acclaimed violinist and prolific recording artist Philippe Graffin has scored a major coup in unearthing the Violin Concerto of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, the Afro-English composer whose star has waned since the height of his fame at the turn of the last century, but is set to rise again on the strength of this world-premiere recording.

Coleridge-Taylor's musical education was as English as they come - studying at the Royal College with Stanford alongside such luminaries as Vaughan Williams and Holst - but his most powerful influences were the folk music and poetry of African-Americans and American Indians, reinforced by his first visit to the US in 1900. References to and inspiration from spirituals and slave songs abound in the Violin Concerto, making the coupling of the Violin Concerto by Dvorak who was equally inspired by American idioms, apt indeed. In fact, the great American violinist Maud Powell who championed Coleridge-Taylor's works and premiered his Violin Concerto in June 1912 - called him the "colored Dvorak". In an interesting twist, the US premiere was nearly derailed when the original parts sank with the Titanic!

Under the inspired direction of British-born conductor Michael Hankinson, the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra is a musical miracle in a country whose national priorities seem a far cry from promoting Western classical music. Established in 2000 by a multi-cultural group of committed musicians, the JPO have created an exciting ensemble whose aims extend to the musical education of their public and, thanks to this recording, will resound world-wide. Their motto: "A nation that turns its back on its culture turns its back on itself." What better way to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of democracy in South Africa.

Across continents, throughout various cultures and political surroundings, music has nurtured the childhoods of millions. The violin, in particular, has been for centuries the chosen instrument for the expression of poor and oppressed people. For instance, in the ghettos of Vilnius or Warsaw, some of the greatest violinists were born. So it is also now in Soweto. In just about every township or school across South Africa, thousands of children are learning to play an instrument, most often the violin. As this country is confronted with some of the gravest challenges of our time, it is a humbling experience to listen to them play with such uninhibited joy.

While recording the Coleridge-Taylor concerto, I often thought about its dedicatee, Maud Powell, knowing she must have been an exceptional woman, and that she too had toured South Africa. She was born in 1867 in Peru, Illinois, and soon became one of America's greatest violinists, and the first woman to do so. She devoted her entire life to propagating music across new lands, and fought against prejudices and racism, at a time when these were very much the norm. One of her very last apearances was a benefit concert for the Negro Music School Settlement in New York City shortly before her early death in 1920. She used to joke that the violin concerto was "Taylor made" for her, and indeed one can get a glimpse of that in the slow movement when listening to her play her pot-pourri of selected arias from Puccini's operas. It was also known that Dvorak was Coleridge-Taylor's hero, to which Maud Powell eluded when she named him the "black Dvorak" As she also premiered Dvoraks violin concerto in America, it is not only their interpreter that they shared but also her sense of value.

To be a musician today in South Africa implies redefining the very role of music in a modern society, and the musicians of the JPO are doing this every day. It has been a privilege to make music with them and Michael Hankinson. My warmest thanks to Sara Gon for believing from the start in this project, to Simon Foster for having faith in it, and to all my friends in Gauteng.

-Philippe Graffin

Formed by a group of committed, resilient musicians, the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra (JPO) was established in 2000 following the demise of the National Symphony Orchestra. The circumstances couldn't have been more hopeless. The new government's priorities were focused on a range of the most intractable social and economic problems: reversing the devastating effects of apartheid, HIV/AIDS, crime, unemployment - all on a massive scale.

The corporate sector was suffering from donor fatigue and, at the same time, was being pressed to join the government in overcoming all the challenges South African society had to meet. Preserving a "Euro-centric" art form was not a priority! So 30-odd musicians did it themselves.

Into this hostile climate and using virtually only private sector sponsorships, the JPO has managed to rebuild a symphony concert culture in Johannesburg of increasing excitement and quality with a freelance orchestra. The JPO employs one full-time employee and 5 part-timers, three of whom are JPO musicians.

Producing this world-premiere recording towards the end of the JPO's fourth year of existence is nothing short of miraculous...typical South African chutzpah!

There is no more fitting way for us to celebrate the 10th anniversary of democracy in South Africa.

SAMUEL COLERIDGE-TAYLOR and DVORAK VIOLIN CONCERTOS

In the course of his too-short life, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor rose to an iconic status well ahead of his time. Received at the White House by President Roosevelt, with an American choral society named after him and his cantata Hiawatha's Wedding Feast (later a trilogy of Scenes from Hiawatha based on Henry W. Longfellow's epic poem) known throughout the choral-singing world, his musical achievements were virtually unprecedented among people of African origin in Europe and America.

Coleridge-Taylor was in fact of mixed race: his mother was English and his father was a doctor from Sierra Leone. His musical talents were likewise eclectic. Having entered the Royal College of Music in 1890 as a violinist, he emerged seven years later as a composer and conductor. His composition teacher, Charles Stanford, once told another pupil who had made a racially disparaging remark about Coleridge-Taylor that the black student 'had more talent in his little finger' than the rest of the class had in their whole bodies.

He went on to become the conductor of the Handel Society and a professor of composition at Trinity College of Music and the Guildhall School of Music. But he was also a keen participant in black activism: much influenced by the African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, with whom he collaborated on several sets of songs and an opera, Dream Lovers (1898), he regarded it as a personal mission to help achieve equality for his race. In 1900 he was one of the organisers of the first international Pan-Africanist conference in London and he collaborated in founding a London-based newspaper, the African and Orient Review. Meanwhile, Hiawatha's Wedding Feast (1898) achieved a popularity in Britain that could only be compared to Handel's Messiah.

Visiting the USA in 1906, Coleridge-Taylor met the musical philanthropists Carl and Ellen Stoeckel who from that year onwards held an annual Norfolk Music Festival in their 'Music Shed' (seating more than 1600 people) in the foothills of the Berkshire mountains. They invited him to conduct Hiawatha at the festival in 1910, where he was much f?d by an enthusiastic audience. The occasion gave him the chance to become reacquainted with the great violinist Maud Powell, who had already performed several of his short works for violin and piano.

In discussion with Powell and the Stoeckels, Coleridge-Taylor developed the idea of writing a violin concerto based on negro spiritual themes. After he had completed the work, however, neither he nor Powell was content with it. The composer asked the violinist to send it back, saying that he was instead 'writing a new work at white heat'; Carl Stoeckel also received word from Coleridge-Taylor 'requesting me to throw [the concerto] into the fire; and saying that he had written an entirely new and original work, all the melodies being his own, and that it was a hundred times better than the first composition'.

On receiving the replacement concerto, Powell declared that it was 'like a bouquet of flowers' and dubbed the composer 'a coloured Dvorak'. She agreed to give the premiere on 4 June 1912 - though the event was almost scuppered when the orchestral parts were shipped to the USA on the Titanic. Fortunately Coleridge-Taylor was able to produce a new set in time.

Less happily, he was unable to attend the premiere himself. Overworked and exhausted - his celebrity did not extend to financial security - he died of pneumonia that September, aged only 38. On his sickbed, he apparently seemed to be conducting an imaginary performance of his Violin Concerto. Remembering his encounters with Coleridge-Taylor, the composer Havergal Brian wrote that he was 'in all truth the image of the hero in his masterpiece, Hiawatha. Our interest in his music ebbs and flows, which is well, for like the sea it will never grow stale.'

The concerto - which has only been performed a handful of times and never recorded before the present account - follows the traditional three-movement format. The solemn and lyrical character of the sonata-form first movement seems to recall Dvorak at times, Grieg at others and, in the rich use of the brass section, Elgar, whom Coleridge-Taylor revered. Some of its melodic contours occasionally suggest the influence of negro spiritual themes. The exquisite slow movement, opening with muted strings, is imbued with a delicacy and wistfulness of exceptional inspiration; and the major-key finale, with its syncopated rhythms, resolves the work in a generally lighter and optimistic mood.

Dvorak's Violin Concerto predates Coleridge-Taylor's by 29 years. Its composer too was one day to be greatly inspired by the indigenous music of America. Recent research has revealed that Dvorak had himself considered writing an opera on Hiawatha and that although he abandoned the project, many of the themes he had developed for it found their way ultimately into his Ninth Symphony, 'From the New World'. The cor anglais melody of the second movement turned out to have been intended for the death of Minnehaha.

The spirit of Dvorak's native Bohemia, however, thoroughly infuses the rhythmic drive and lavish melodies of his Violin Concerto. It dates from summer 1879, when Dvorak was receiving his greatest international acclaim yet thanks to his Slavonic Dances. Through Brahms, a generous champion, he met the great violinist Joseph Joachim, who played an important role in the concerto's creative process, making extensive suggestions for revisions, most of which Dvorak adopted (though he refused to cut the beautiful linking passage between the first and second movements). Joachim in the end never performed the work; the premiere was instead given by Frantisek Ondricek, a Czech violinist and friend of Dvorak's, in 1883. It was none other than Maud Powell who performed the concerto for the first time in the USA.

Like Coleridge-Taylor's concerto, Dvorak's moves from opening darkness towards concluding light; this progression, plus the connection of the first movement to the second without a break, follows a format well established by the violin concertos of Mendelssohn and Bruch. But also this work seems in several respects to anticipate Dvorak's later cello concerto - notably in the haunting, declamatory opening themes, and the turbulent central episode in the otherwise intensely tender slow movement. The final movement is based on a Czech folk-dance called the 'furiant', which Dvorak used frequently in the Slavonic Dances. Its characteristic lilting cross-rhythms, combined felicitously with Dvorak's favourite harmonic twists, permeate this irresistible finale.

- Jessica Duchen

Philippe Graffin's individual style of playing and outstanding achievements have already placed him among the finest of French violinists. Graffin graduated from the Paris Conservatoire with a first prize at sixteen. He later studied with Prof Josef Gingold in Bloomington, Indiana and with Philippe Hirschhorn.

In 1987 he was Laureate of the Fritz Kreisler Competition in Austria since when Mr Graffin's international career has seen him appear as soloist with major orchestras in the UK and Europe and at many international festivals and concert halls including Amsterdam's Concertgebouw and the Berlin Konzerthaus.

Graffin is founder and artistic director of "Consonances", the international chamber music festival of St. Nazaire, France and is regularly invited to appear at major chamber music festivals across Europe and the United States including the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. He has appeared in the BBC Proms Chamber Music season and been invited to be Artistic Director of several chamber music projects at London's Wigmore Hall.

A number of composers have written for him. Lithuanian composer Vytautas Barkauskas received the 2004 Lithuanian National Prize for Art for his violin concerto "Jeux", which he dedicated to Philippe. David Matthews wrote his 2nd violin concerto for Philippe and Yves Prin, Vassili Lobanov and Philippe Hersant have written solo pieces for him. Philippe has also performed Rodion Shchedrin's Concerto Cantabile under the baton of Mstislav Rostropovich and in Moscow to mark the composer's 70th birthday.

Philippe Graffin's recordings include the Ysaye solo violin sonatas, Chausson's complete chamber music, Saint-Sa? violin concertos, a disc of Saint-Saens' violin and piano music and discs of rare French works including the Faure Concerto and of sonatas by de Breville and Canteloube.