John Wilson’s third volume of the music of Eric Coates combines some of the composer’s larger-scale works with miniatures and two marches.

The Cinderella Phantasy frames the well-known fairy-tale from Cinderella’s perspective, glossing over the more brutal elements of the original, with some notably descriptive writing for the dream sequences, the ball and of course the happy ending.

The Three Men is to some extent autobiographical, as Coates explores his love of his native Nottinghamshire countryside, his love for London and his love of the sea.

The Three Elizabeths is a suite of portraits of three great figures in English History – Queen Elizabeth I; Elizabeth of Glamis (then the Queen Consort, now remembered as the Queen Mother), and Princess Elizabeth (who of course became Queen Elizabeth II).

Lost Love is a wistful Romance written in 1939, while the much later Sweet Seventeen is a beautiful waltz, inspired by Eric and his wife Phyliss’ love of dancing. In fact, the title refers to his first date with Phyllis, at the Blenheim Restaurant, the day before her seventeenth birthday. Two marches complete the program – the Television March was commissioned by the BBC (just three weeks before the date of broadcast!) for the resumption of television broadcasting in 1946. The Dam Busters March was used as the main title for Michael Anderson’s 1955 film and is arguably the composer’s most widely known work.

REVIEW:

The Dam Busters march became the biggest and final hit of Coates’s career. John Wilson’s way with it – letting that tune glide in almost imperceptibly, relishing the moment when the violins decorate it, like sprinkling icing on a cake – typifies his approach.

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For the second volume of the music of Eric Coates, John Wilson has built his programme around three contrasting ‘major’ works. The Suite Summer Days was premiered in October 1919, shortly after Henry Wood had fired Coates from his position as lead viola in the Queen’s Hall Orchestra. An immediate hit, the suite received rave reviews and many more performances. It was recorded in 1926, Sir Edward Elgar telling Coates that he had played it so often that he had worn out the album! The Selfish Giant, from 1925, based on Oscar Wilde’s story, was the first in a series of highly successful musical retellings of fairy tales. The Enchanted Garden originated in a commission from the Swedish Broadcasting Company. Although he described The Enchanted Garden as a ballet, Coates conceived it principally as a concert work. Composed in June and July 1938, it was premiered in a BBC radio broadcast in November that year, immediately before Coates took it on tour to Stockholm. Of the other, shorter pieces on the album, Calling All Workers is arguably Coates’s best-known work, composed in the summer of 1940 and dedicated ‘to all who work’. The march was adopted by the BBC as the signature tune for their new daily radio show ‘Music While You Work’, and was heard twice daily for twenty-seven years – clocking up more than 16,000 broadcast performances.

REVIEWS:

The second volume in John Wilson’s Eric Coates edition for Chandos reprises the excellence to be found in the first. Wilson has recorded much Coates for other labels but to find him return to the repertoire in a more formalized way is especially good news.

– MusicWeb International

Wilson has been a Coates champion for decades and has the natural lightness of touch to make these works, including a substantial ballet, The Enchanted Garden, and an Oscar Wilde-based phantasy, The Selfish Giant, sparkle.

– Sunday Times (UK)

Significant new additions to the recorded catalogue of this most broad-minded of Danish conductors, working in the last two years of his life and featuring several composers of his own time who were writing in their own post-Nielsen styles. Hardly less novel is the wartime recording of Coates’s Knightsbridge March, never reissued since first appearing on 78s. Several other light-orchestral classics are complemented by spontaneous-sounding live Tchaikovsky in the hands of a little-known French violinist.