Albert Coates conducts 20^th Century music
London Symphony Orchestra, Leeds Festival Choir
rec. 1920-1932, London, UK
Pristine Audio PASC768 [2 CDs: 121]

Pristine Audio has done well by Albert Coates, and they add to their restorations with this set containing the fiery Coates’s twentieth-century recordings, made here between 1920 and 1932.

In October 1919 Elgar conducted the première of his Cello Concerto with Felix Salmond and the LSO, an evening that has generated some fanciful writing. Though Lady Elgar was scathing about Coates hogging rehearsal time (she called him ‘a bounder’), the première wasn’t in any sense the disaster it’s since been made out to be. The work Coates was rehearsing for that evening, along with Borodin’s Second Symphony, was Scriabin’s The Poem of Ecstasy, and a matter of six months later Columbia recorded him in it with the LSO. Fortunately, he was also to record the Borodin. Columbia’s forward-looking recording was a valiant attempt to capture something of Scriabin’s work but inevitably the acoustic system could not begin to convey the mysteries and colour of the work. The Columbia engineers did the best they could and the LSO play with character and a fair amount of discipline. As Mark Obert-Thorn informs us in his Producer’s note, 19 bars are inadvertently missing but even so Coates is characteristically fast. 

This is the only acoustic in this set. Coates recorded two excerpts from Stravinsky’s The Firebird for HMV in February 1928, the same excerpts that Beecham had recorded over a decade earlier, for Columbia – The Princesses’ Game with the Golden Apples and the Infernal Dance of All Kashchei’s Subjects. This came in good time for Beecham’s acoustic examples to be withdrawn by Columbia, which they were in July 1929, in light of the obvious technical superiority of HMV’s new versions, though Coates has some trouble with ensemble at a couple of points. He also recorded excerpts from The Song of the Nightingale in 1930 in Kingsway Hall but this time in even more immediate sound than The Firebird – amazing what two short years’ experience in Kingsway Hall taught the engineers.

The remainder of the first disc focuses on Prokofiev, the first orchestral recording of whose music is here – it beat Koussevitzky by two years – three excerpts from The Love for Three Oranges vividly, excitingly and energetically performed. Ensemble just about survives in the Scherzo. Le pas d’acier (The Dance of Steel) was a new work, composed in 1926 and recorded in February 1932 in the new Abbey Road studios.  These pithy character pieces, of which we hear eight movements, was recorded complete but numbers 7 to 9 were never released for some reason. Coates certainly catches the urchin scamper of The little street vendors, the sternness of The Entrance of the characters, the sour satiric Orator and the sheer dynamism of the finale.

Whilst Boult is remembered for first causing the Planets to shine, in Holst’s own words, its official première was actually given by Coates in 1920. Boult had given a private incomplete performance in 1918 and Holst had conducted just three movements in 1919. In September 1926 in early electric sound Coates recorded four movements – Mars, Mercury, Jupiter and Uranus. The sessions were made in Kingsway Hall at about the same time that Holst re-recorded The Planets from June to September in the boxy Columbia studios in Petty France, London – his acoustic set had been made in 1923. Both men used the LSO though for contractual reasons – the LSO was contracted to Columbia – just ‘Symphony Orchestra’ appeared on the labels of Coates’ recording. 

Coates generates full mechanistic weight in Mars, and his tempi and Holst’s match identically in Mercury. Jupiter is an outstanding example of Coates’s mercurial, individualist spirit. For the great central ‘tune’ he remains steadier than Holst, terracing dynamics is a way I’ve never before encountered, the better to sing more fully as the grandeur develops, full of stately unstoppable nobility. The orchestral portamenti are strongly audible here, a function of Coates’ gargantuan, Nikisch-derived aesthetic. Holst offers a more clipped, tidy appraisal, a composer-conductor’s objectified approach, whilst Coates offers the romantic in excelsis. Like it or loathe it, it’s unforgettable. Fortunately, Kingsway Hall could contain Uranus, that orchestral showpiece to end all showpieces and Coates drives through it faster than Holst or Boult, characterful and individualistic to the very last. What a shame that he wasn’t allowed to record the whole thing. The Ballet Music from The Perfect Fool was recorded at the same time providing more evidence, if any were needed, of his inherent vigour.

The previous year, in October 1925, he made what must be one of the first recordings of Bax – his a cappella masterpiece Mater ora Filium – one of the first electric recordings HMV made outside their studios, recorded in St John’s Church, St John’s Wood in London. The Leeds Festival Choir was 250 strong and that year they and Coates premiered Holst’s First Choral Symphony in Leeds. This is a powerful and resonant performance directed by the man whose première of Bax’s First Symphony three years earlier had generated a flurry of critical talk.

In 1927 Coates recorded Respighi’s The Fountains of Rome, again a première recording in which a fair simulacrum of the evocation the score generates is conveyed. It would hardly be possible for a recording of this vintage to summon up the colouristic and impressionistic richness of the score but for the time, and for the gramophones available at the time, it must have been splendidly vivid. The same goes for Ravel’s La Valse (March 1926, Queen’s Hall, London).

Obert-Thorn’s transfers effortlessly surpass Koch’s 1992 discs where they offer competing works – The Planets, Respighi, Ravel, Stravinsky.

Coates’s recordings are, like the man himself, full of character and amplitude, individual, slightly cranky sometimes, but always rich in speed, energy and vitality and no little nobility.

Jonathan Woolf 

Contents

CD 1 (57:21)
1. Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915)
The Poem of Ecstasy, Op. 54 (1905–08) (19:10)
Recorded 27 April & 7 May 1920, Columbia Clerkenwell Road Studio, London · Matrices: 74060-2, 74061-2, 74081-1, 74082-2 & 74062-1 · First issued on Columbia L 1380/2
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
The Firebird (1910)
2. The Princesses’ Game with the Golden Apples (2:38)
3. Infernal Dance of All Kashchei’s Subjects (4:15)
Recorded 15 February 1928, Kingsway Hall, London · Matrices: CR 1693-1 & 1692-2A · First issued on HMV D 1510
Igor Stravinsky
Song of the Nightingale (excerpts) (1914–21)
4. Celebration at the Palace of the Emperor of China (3:41)
5. Chinese March (3:16)
6. Funeral March (conclusion) (1:21)
Recorded 14 October 1930, Kingsway Hall, London · Matrices: Cc 20615-2 & 20614-2 · First issued on HMV D 1932
Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)
The Love for Three Oranges, Op. 33 (1921)
7. Infernal Scene (2:47)
8. March (1:42)
9. Scherzo (1:20)
Recorded 6 January 1927, Kingsway Hall, London · Matrices: CR 904-2 & 905-2A · First issued on HMV D 1259
Le pas d’acier, Op. 41 (1926)
10. Entrance of the characters (2:08)
11. The train of trading peasants (2:12)
12. The commissars (1:52)
13. The little street vendors (1:54)
14. The orator (1:54)
15. The sailor with bracelets and the working girl (2:19)
16. The hammers (1:34)
17. Finale (3:08)
Recorded 18 February 1932, Abbey Road Studio No. 1, London · Matrices: 2B 2199-2, 2200-2, 2801-2 & 2804-1 · First issued on HMV DB 1680/1
CD 2 (64:21)
Gustav Holst (1874-1934)
The Planets, Op. 32 (1914–17)
1. Mars, the Bringer of War (6:02)
2. Mercury, the Winged Messenger (3:34)
3. Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity (7:24)
4. Uranus, the Magician (5:24)
Recorded 20 September 1926, Kingsway Hall, London · Matrices: CR 694-1 & 695-1 (Mars), 693-2 (Mercury), 689-1A & 690-1 (Jupiter), 691-2 & 692-1 (Uranus) · First issued on HMV D 2006 (Mars), D 1308 (Mercury), D 1129 (Jupiter), D 1384 (Uranus)
The Perfect Fool – Ballet Music, Op. 39 (1918–22)
5. Introduction – Dance of Spirits of Earth (3:31)
Recorded 20 September 1926, Kingsway Hall, London · Matrix: CR 699-2 · First issued on HMV D 1308
6. Arnold Bax (1883-1953)
Mater ora Filium (1921) (11:04)
Recorded 28 October 1925, St John’s Church, St John’s Wood, London · Matrices: CR 4-1, 5-2 & 6-1 · First issued on HMV D 1044/5
Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936)
The Fountains of Rome (1916)
7. The Fountain of Valle Giulia at Dawn (4:07)
8. The Triton Fountain in the Morning (2:30)
9. The Trevi Fountain at Noon (3:24)
10. The Villa Medici Fountain at Sunset (5:56)
Recorded 4 January 1927 & 5 January 1928 · Matrices: CR 894-1, 895-1A, 896-2 & 897-2A · First issued on HMV D 1429/30
11. Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)
La valse (1919–20) (11:20)
Recorded 26 March 1926, Queen’s Hall, London · Matrices: CR 214-1, 215-1 & 216-1 · First issued on Victor 9130/1
London Symphony Orchestra (CD 1; CD 2, tracks 7–10)
Symphony Orchestra (CD 2, tracks 1–5 & 11)
Leeds Festival Choir(CD 2, track 6)