Eric Coates - Four Centuries, Suite for orchestra (1942)

Eric Francis Harrison Coates (27 August 1886 – 21 December 1957) was an English composer of light music and, early in his career, a leading violist.

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Four Centuries, Suite for orchestra (1942)
Dedication: To my dear wife

I. Prelude and Hornpipe (17th Century) (0:00)
II. Pavane and Tambourin (18th Century) (6:36)
III. Valse (19th Century) (13:04)
IV. Rhythm (20th Century) (18:13)

The East of England Orchestra conducted by Malcolm Nabarro.

Throughout Coates’ life he had a fondness for the music of the British dance bands. This stemmed from a love of dancing; during the 1920s, Eric and Phyl were regular patrons of London’s exclusive night clubs and hotels including the Kit-Kat Club and the Savoy Hotel. He counted bandleaders Jack Hyltonand Jack Payne amongst his friends (Coates even wrote the foreword to Payne’s 1932 autobiography). The style of the dance bands (along with that of the songwriters of the era – Gershwin, Rodgers and Kern) also heavily influenced his melodic and harmonic writing. This was clearly seen with a number of works written in the 1920s and ‘30s, mostly notably in Two Light Syncopated Pieces and the first two phantasies and reaching its apex with the finale of The Four Centuries Suite.

During the late-1940s, Coates was concerned about making his music more relevant to a new generation. This was not only brought about through the re-writing of passages but also making cuts to the music. This time it was not solely the result of having to curtail his compositions to fit on to gramophone records, but because he felt, in some compositions, that he had overstayed his welcome. Writing to the conductor Gilbert
Vinter in 1951 he re-called his Four Centuries Suite:

"…I am afraid I find the first and the last movements a little too long anyhow and if I had written it now I would have cut them both down considerably to bring them into the five-minute limit. Well, as one gets older one becomes less long-winded – in the words of the Immortal Bard: “Brevity is the soul of wit” – and how right he is".

The Four Centuries Suite was the apogee of his ‘new direction’. Written in the darkest days of War in 1940-41, it was inspired by the bombing of London as seen from the Coates’ Baker Street flat. The work was completed, after a gap, in their temporary home in Amersham. In the work, he depicts dancing in the twentieth and previous three centuries: the seventeenth century, depicted by a Prelude and Hornpipe; the eighteenth, a Pavane and Tambourin; the nineteenth, a Valse; while the twentieth, ‘Rhythm’ is an affectionate tribute to the dance bands. The scoring reflects the orchestra of the period; ‘Rhythm’ has a trio of saxophones. The work was symphonic in conception and a remarkable creation. After the Suite’s premiere (by the BBC Theatre Orchestra and Stanford Robinson), Coates tried to entice EMI to record the work with Robinson and his BBC forces. EMI declined and Coates suggested that instead of a commercial release they could issue the recording as a special issue to broadcasting companies. This they also declined to do. In the end, Coates retired defeated. However, in 1944 an opportunity to record the work materialised and he relished the challenge of getting the National Symphony Orchestra to play the work exactly as he wanted it.