Eric Coates - The Three Men, Suite for Orchestra (1935)

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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The Three Men, Suite for Orchestra (1935)

I. The Man from the Country (0:00)
II. The Man about Town (4:53)
III. The Man from the Sea (9:25)

Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by John Wilson.

Eric Coates' work is in the tradition of polished melodic light music started by Sir Arthur Sullivan and continued by Edward German. Indeed, in his early years, Coates was much influenced by German. During the 1920s, however, Eric Coates developed a distinctive style which embraced his own use of the newly-introduced American syncopated idiom. He was the first European composer to treat this new style seriously and successfully integrate it into symphonic writing. When he adopted syncopation, the music critics of the heavier press ignored him but it never concerned him. 'After writing the London Suite,' he once said, 'I moved from the music page to the news page and it was one of the moves I have never regretted.'

Eric Coates enjoyed conducting his own music and had very decided views on the subject. He liked his music to be taken at brisk and lively tempi — he frowned on those conductors who made it sound slow and stodgy — there was nothing like that about him. Stanford Robinson, who must have conducted more performances and made more recordings of Eric's music than any other conductor, said, 'He was a very good conductor. He was always neat and immaculate and, of course, having been an orchestral player himself, he did not bully the orchestra but he was always in control.'

One's overall impression, reading his autobiography, Suite in Four Movements, published in 1953, is that Eric Coates was an essentially happy person, full of joie de vivre. His son, Austin Coates, confirmed that this was so and said: 'Yes, that's absolutely true although at home we noticed how calm and extremely well ordered he was. For instance, he couldn't settle down to write music until he was properly dressed in the morning complete with tie and Harris Tweed coat — and, perhaps, a Turkish cigarette. He was very formal at home and incredibly tidy. If I left a book lying around anywhere there would be quite a lot of remonstrances to follow. But he was very easy to live with.'

Recently, Sir Charles Groves wrote of him, 'Eric Coates was a gentle and quietly-spoken man but his music crackled with vitality. He could write tunes and could clothe them in the most attractive instrumental colours; not for nothing had he been Henry Wood's Principal Viola in the Queen's Hall Orchestra. 'He did not, as far as I know, aspire to writing symphonies or oratorios. He knew what he could do and he did it superbly well. 'Someone once said that the marches of Souza would make a man with a wooden leg step out; a man would have to have a wooden heart not to respond to the music of Eric Coates.'

When Eric Coates died on December 21st 1957, it was rightly commented that perhaps no other composer had ever provided music to suit the public taste so unerringly for so many years. Indeed from his early song successes in Edwardian days to those of his last orchestral works (including The Dam Busters' March), Eric Coates was recognised as the 'uncrowned king of light music'.