Artist's albums
Coates: Orchestral Works, Vol. 3
2023 · album
Coates: Television March
2023 · single
Coates: Last Love
2023 · single
Coates: Three Lyric Pieces
2022 · single
The Green Hills o'Somerset
2021 · single
Coates, Elgar, Coward: Orchestral Music
2021 · album
Coates: Orchestral Works, Vol. 2
2020 · album
Coates: Orchestra Works, Vol. 1
2019 · album
Coates: By the Sleepy Lagoon
2019 · single
Coates: Songs
2019 · album
The Best Of 'The Definitive Eric Coates'
2018 · album
Music of Eric Coates
2014 · album
The Definitive Eric Coates
2013 · compilation
Eric Coates conducts Eric Coates
2012 · album
The Enchanted Garden - Music of Eric Coates
2012 · compilation
Coates: London Suite; London Again Suite; Summer Days Suite & Songs
2012 · compilation
TV and Radio Themes from the 50s and 60s
2011 · album
The Golden Age of Light Music: War and Peace - Light Music of the 1940s
2010 · compilation
Organ Miscellany, Vol. 2
2010 · album
The Golden Age of Light Music: The Show Goes On
2008 · compilation
Eric Coates - Sound and Vision
2008 · album
The Golden Age of Light Music: Light Music While You Work - Vol. 2
2007 · compilation
Coates: Orchestral Works
2007 · album
Coates: London Again Suite
2006 · album
The Golden Age of Light Music: The 1940s
2004 · compilation
Similar artists
Biography
Eric Coates was perhaps the most important composer of symphonic light music in the first half of the twentieth century outside the Viennese sphere. He took the music genre and made it into as bona fide and influential an art form as that created by any member of the Strauss family. He is often regarded as the Mozart of a music world whose generally light emotional expression is colored by splashy orchestration and perky rhythms. Yet, his music featured an elegance and aristocratic air and could capture moods and, in stage works, story lines with deftly vivid imagery. Among his important compositions are the 1930 ballet Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, revised eight years later and re-titled The Enchanted Garden; and Springtime Suite from 1937. Even though Coates composed music in a less serious genre, he must be regarded nearly as highly as England's other important figures from his time, Vaughan Williams, Sir Arnold Bax, and Gustav Holst. The youngest of five children, whose physician father was an amateur flutist and whose mother was an accomplished pianist, Eric began study on the violin at age six. Later on he took up the viola. He showed no serious interest in composing until age 20 when he entered the Royal Academy of Music, where he studied viola with Lionel Tertis and composition with Frederick Corder. In the period between 1908 and 1909, he wrote his first vocal works: Four old English Songs and Stonecracker John. In 1910 he began playing the viola in the Beecham Symphony Orchestra and shortly afterward got a similar post in the Queen's Hall Orchestra, under Sir Henry Wood. He turned out his first orchestral work, the Miniature Suite, in 1911. Two years later, Coates married 18-year-old Phyllis Black, who would write lyrics for him and be of immense help to him throughout his career. Because of a progressive neuritis in his left hand and arm, Coates was exempt from military service during the war years. By 1919, however, the condition forced him to give up his first-chair viola post in the Queen's Hall Orchestra. In 1927, Coates composed his orchestral suite Four Ways, which achieved considerable popularity. Perhaps his greatest success, though, came with the 1933 London Suite, which contained a section called "Knightsbridge," a march that took on a life apart from the suite when it was used to introduce the BBC radio program In Town Tonight, which became familiar to virtually every British listener during its 27-year run. When his wife began working for the Red Cross in 1940, Coates was moved to write Calling All Workers, whose theme was subsequently used by the BBC for another radio show, Music While You Work. The orchestral suites Four Centuries (1942) and Three Elizabeths (1944) merely solidified his position now as the composer of the most familiar British music of all time. In the postwar years, Coates continued to turn out popular scores, like Music Everywhere (1949). The composer continued to be active as a conductor in his last years, taking up the baton at one notable Promenade concert in August 1956, after Sir Malcolm Sargent had led the orchestra in a Tchaikovsky work. The 70-year-old Coates led the ensemble in his Four Centuries Suite and drew an enthusiastic response from the audience. Coates suffered a stroke and died on December 23, 1957.