Summer Days Suite

In a Country Lane

On the Edge of the Lake

At the Dance

The one piece by Eric Coates that we all know - even if we don’t all know its title or the name of the composer - is By the Sleepy Lagoon, which is and always has been the signature tune for the BBC’s long-running “Desert Island Discs.” Other familiar, or once familiar, Coates pieces include The Damnbusters March, the recording of which sold a quarter of a million copies in the first two years after “The Damnbusters” film was first screened in 1954, Calling All Workers, which became the signature for “Music while You Work” in 1940, and the Knighstbridge March , which was adopted for another popular BBC programme, “In Town Tonight,” in the 1930s.

Clearly Eric Coates was an expert composer of light music and, in fact, that is all he ever wanted to be. But that doesn’t mean that he didn’t command immense respect at all levels of the musical profession. Edward Elgar, for example, had a standing order with a shop in Oxford Street for every new Coates recording that came out. His copy of the Summer Day Suite, he once confessed, was quite worn out. That sunny little suite was written in 1919, the same year as Elgar’s Cello Concerto, which is anything but sunny. As both composers knew, the first rule of light music is that, however troubled the times, it should avoid serious or depressing issues and should, on the contrary, offer the audience an attractive escape route.

True to its type, Summer Day gives not the slightest hint that European civilisation had recently been violently overturned and that nothing would ever be the same again. The first movement, In a Country Lane, sounds as though post-war Britain were still the “Merrie England” associated with Edward German or Arthur Sullivan. On the Edge of the Lake is more ambitious in that it is a little longer and rather more expressive but it is still an idyll, featuring a nostalgic oboe solo and drawing on drawing on just enough of Delius to evoke the English countryside without getting in the least morbid about it. But the great success of the suite was At the Dance, which is a brilliant symphonic waltz, not so much English in style as central-European, somewhere between Franz Lehár and Richard Strauss and yet distinctive Eric Coates at the same time.

Gerald Larner ©2003