Three Elizabeths

Halcyon Days (Elizabeth Tudor)

Spring Time in Angus (Elizabeth of Glamis)

Youth of Britain (Princess Elizabeth)

The one piece by Eric Coates that we all know – even if we are not all aware of its title or of 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 tune 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 was incapable of putting together an extended concert piece. Among the best are his three fairy-tale “phantasies” (The Selfish Giant, The Three Bears and Cinderella) written during the 1920s. Another is the suite The Three Elizabeths which he dedicated in 1944 to Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother) as an acknowledgement of the affection she inspired during the Second World War. She occupies the central position here between Queen Elizabeth I in Halcyon Days and Princess Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth II) in Youth of Britain.

Actually, with Queen Elizabeth I Coates cheated a little since Halcyon Days already existed as a concert overture and has so little that is Tudor about it that it was most effectively used by BBC TV for its “Forsyte Saga” drama series in the 1960s. It is, however, with its fanfare opening, a very appropriate introduction to a suite inspired by royalty and, with its briskly tuneful march-time material, a smartly turned-out salute to a particularly heroic period in British history. Spring Time in Angus is a very much more specific, indeed personal, tribute. Alludng to the then Queen Elizabeth’s Scottish ancestry, it is an affectionate evocation of the countryside around Glamis Castle with a pronounced local accent in the melodic idiom and a cuckoo calling in the distance. The older of her two daughters, now Queen Elizabeth II, was 18 at the time the work was written – hence the bright future predicted in Youth of Britain, another briskly cheerful march, punctuated by fanfares, to balance that of Halcyon Days at the beginning of the suite and with a broadly melodious expression of hope to round it all off.