Albert Coates and London Symphony Orchestra - Fountains of Rome (Respighi) (1927)

Alfred Coates conducts the London Symphony Orchestra in Ottorino Respighi's 'Fountains of Rome,' recorded in Kingsway Hall, London, on 4 January 1927 and transferred from solid stock Sydney pressings of HMV D 1429/30.

The practice of The Gramophone Company at the time was to feed the signal from the microphone(s) into two recording machines. (If two microphones were used, sometimes each had its own recording machine, and at other times a composite output was fed to the machines). The idea behind this practice was to set the recording level of each machine differently with a view to maximising the prospect of obtaining a record that was sufficiently loud and yet passed the Company's wear test. This certainly made sense in theory, and most multi-side works recorded at the time were comprised of a mixture of sides from the two machines. In this case, sides 1 and 3 were recorded on machine 1 and sides 2 and 4 were recorded on machine 2.

So much for the theory. For things to work reasonably well in practice, it was obviously necessary for both machines to be calibrated in an identical manner: and it is apparent that in 1927 this was not always the case in relation either to recording characteristic or turntable speed. The characteristic was, of course, supposed to be standard, but it is quite apparent that during the first couple of years of electric recording it varied from time to time, possibly the result of the failure of a component somewhere in the system or the use of the wrong component. As regards speed variations, these were obviously due to lack of care on the part of the engineers.

In the case of 'The Fountains of Rome,' it is apparent that the turntable speed of machine 1 was close to 80 rpm while machine 2 was running at 78. Of the two sides recorded on machine 2, side 2 was clearly recorded at a relatively low level but side 4 seems to be at about the same level as the recordings made on machine 1. The recordings made on machine 2, however, are a little brighter than those made on machine 1. All of these things have meant that transferring a mere 4 sides has required a number of adjustments and quite a lot of listening! I like the Respighi work, however, so I think the effort has been worthwhile.

From Wikipedia: Albert Coates (23 April 1882 – 11 December 1953) was an English conductor and composer. Born in St. Petersburg where his English father was a successful businessman, he studied in Russia, England and Germany, before beginning his career as a conductor in a series of German opera houses. He was a success in England conducting Wagner at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in 1914, and in 1919 was appointed chief conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra.

His strengths as a conductor lay in opera and the Russian repertory, but was very unjustifiably not thought as impressive in the core Austro-German symphonic repertory despite powerful, incisive renditions of Beethoven's Ninth in 1923 on late acoustic 78s, and of Mozart's 'Jupiter' a few years later on very early electrical 78s. After 1923 he failed to secure a permanent conductorship in the UK despite richly deserving of that honour, and for much of the rest of his life guest-conducted in continental Europe and the U.S. In his last years he conducted in South Africa, where he died at 71.

As a composer, Coates is little remembered, but he composed seven operas, one of which was performed at Covent Garden. He also wrote some concert works for orchestral forces.