Eric Coates (1886-1957)
Orchestral Works Volume 4
Music Everywhere (1948)
Footlights (1939)
I Sing to You (1940)
The Three Bears (1926)
From Meadow to Mayfair (1931)
Under the Stars (1928)
Four Centuries (1941)
BBC Philharmonic/John Wilson
rec. 2023, MediaCityUK, Salford, Manchester, UK
Chandos CHAN20292 [61]
All John Wilson’s previous volumes in Chandos’ Eric Coates series have been reviewed here – see volumes 1 2 and 3. Even before he embarked on this extensive sequence of discs, he’d recorded the music of Coates for other companies – ASV and the label of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic (AV2070). He’s simply a natural fit for Coates’ command of bonhomie, rhythmic vitality, and sheer tunefulness.
It’s always interesting to note when he adopts a Coates-like tempo and when he chooses to be a touch more expansive. Coates was a practical musician, an ex-orchestral violist, and knew very well the length of ten and twelve-inch discs. He had a beady eye for the gramophonic market and conducted his works for it. They’ve all been reissued on 7 CDs by Nimbus (review).
Wilson’s disc opens with Music Everywhere, also known as the Rediffusion March, a snappy three-minute curtain-raiser in which he reprises the tempo taken by Coates in his own 1949 Decca recording. Footlights is a more expansive piece and an elegant example of one of Coates’ concert waltzes. I wouldn’t say it has built-in traps for the unwary but it has a fluid sense of movement so one needs to gauge how to negotiate the movement, say, from the Scherzando to Allegro vivace sections. Wilson and his BBC Philharmonic forces duly negotiate it with great naturalness and with full awareness of its glinting moods. Composed in 1940 as a morale-booster, I Sing to You may not be one of his imperishable masterpieces but it has charm.
Cast on a rather larger canvas and bedecked with a panoply of instructions and explanations, helpfully reprinted here, is The Three Bears, composed for his son Austin on his fourth birthday in 1926. This nine-minute piece has eleven separate tracks telling the story from ‘Who’s Been Sitting in My Chair?’ to ‘Beware! Three Hungry Bears Live Here’. The tight ‘script’ encourages Coates’ talent for theatrical compression – when he recorded it he was swifter than Wilson – and the music is alternately witty and puckish, colourful and dramatic. His humour is at its warmest in the Ragtime tableaux, as the bears waddle home (track 12), and at its most Tchaikovskian as Goldilocks recounts her adventures in a languorous waltz.
Some five years later he wrote From Meadow to Mayfair, a three-movement suite for orchestra, and recorded it the same year with the London Symphony Orchestra, taking very similar tempi to Wilson. The central romance is the movement that allows Wilson the luxury of alluring phrasing. Under the Stars includes a saxophone in the orchestral line-up and it adds to the feel of languorous relaxation. Four Centuries is the piece that takes a light-hearted look at music ‘down the years’, starting with a Prelude and Hornpipe – fine flute from Alex Jakeman – continuing with a Pavane and Tambourin and moving on to a Waltz. For the finale he digs out some Gershwin cadences and fits them to a then-modern dance band with fine percussion and a swinging ‘El Morocco Club’ ethos. The only movement that matches Coates’ tempo is the Waltz but Wilson’s greater latitude brings gains in atmosphere.
Once again this is a winner of a disc, Wilson effortlessly demonstrating that he continues to be the best conductor of Coates’ music around.
Jonathan Woolf
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