Cecil Coles: Music from Behind the lines

Excellent singing and committed playing on this disc — BBC Music Magazine More…

Release Date: 30th Jun 2014
Catalogue No: CDH55464
Label: Helios
Length: 62 minutes

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Coles, C: Overture: The Comedy of Errors

Work length11:04

$2.05

$2.50

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Martyn Brabbins

Coles, C: Fra Giacomo

Work length13:22

$2.05

$2.50

Paul Whelan (baritone)
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Martyn Brabbins

Coles, C: Scherzo in A minor

Work length8:14

$1.50

$1.85

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Martyn Brabbins

Coles, C: Four Verlaine Songs

Work length8:27

$4.00

$5.00

Sarah Fox (soprano)
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Martyn Brabbins

I. Fantastic in appearance

Track length1:29

$1.00

$1.25

II. A slumber vast and black

Track length2:55

$1.00

$1.25

III. Pastoral 'Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit'

Track length1:14

$1.00

$1.25

IV. Let's dance the jig

Track length2:49

$1.00

$1.25

Coles, C: From the Scottish Highlands

Work length12:32

$3.00

$3.75

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Martyn Brabbins

I. Prelude: Presto scherzoso – Allegro maestoso

Track length3:10

$1.00

$1.25

II. Idyll 'Love scene': Larghetto

Track length3:11

$1.00

$1.25

III. Lament: Adagio non troppo e ben marcato

Track length6:11

$1.00

$1.25

Coles, C: Behind the Lines

Work length8:57

$2.00

$2.50

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Martyn Brabbins

I. Estaminet de Carrefour

Track length3:20

$1.00

$1.25

III. Cortège

Track length5:37

$1.00

$1.25

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Born in Scotland in 1888, Cecil Coles studied composition at Edinburgh University, the London College of Music, and Morley College where he befriended Gustav Holst. He furthered his studies in Stuttgart, and was later appointed assistant conductor at the Stuttgart Royal Opera House. Forced to return to England before the outbreak of the First World War, he signed up for overseas service, and in 1915 was sent to the trenches in France. He continued to compose, including the particularly poignant work Behind the lines (dated on the manuscript ‘Feb 4th 1918, In the Field’). The first surviving movement provides a sketch of a northern French pastoral landscape, the second a heroic picture of a military funeral procession. Some two months later, aged just 29, the life of this extraordinarily gifted young musician was extinguished.

Coles was killed near the Somme on 26 April 1918 during a heroic attempt to rescue some wounded comrades. He was one of the most talented of the composers who lost their lives in the First World War, yet few remember him now. Thanks to the persistence and research of his daughter Penny Catherine Coles, his manuscripts, some still embedded with shrapnel, have been painstakingly pieced together helping to create this first commercial recording of these, indeed any of his compositions. In the words of the conductor, ‘this is a most exciting project, musically, socially and historically’. Travelling on a journey somewhere between Mendelssohn and Bruckner or Richard Strauss via Brahms, the music is powerful, beautiful, and full of pathos and emotional intensity, performed here by the BBCSSO under Martyn Brabbins as expressively and passionately as it was composed.

Reviews

Excellent singing and committed playing on this disc

My reactions to the music, even after listening to the disc for some weeks, still oscillate between amazement, melancholy, and gratitude, although they are gradually melding into a fusion of all three. I don’t doubt that it will affect you too

A fascinating and rewarding discovery … performances, production and presentation are all past praise, and this is a disc already earmarked for my Critics’ Choice come the year’s end

The six pieces recorded here justify the mourning of an unfulfilled talent

I listened to it this week, and was moved to something dangerously adjacent to tears … what you chiefly hear in Coles’s compositions is nobility, haunting beauty and a strange, almost prophetic sense of tragedy

Daily Telegraph

Coles’s own orchestral skills are amply demonstrated by the lush, full-bodied playing of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

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