© Kaupo Kikkas
Roger Sacheverell Coke (1912-1972) spent almost his whole life at Brookhill Hall, his family's house on the edge of the Derbyshire pit village of Pinxton, and wrote six piano concertos, three symphonies, five cello sonatas, an opera and many songs. He studied the piano with Mabel Lander on Benno Moiseiwitsch's recommendation and composition with Alan Bush, and by his early twenties was being written about in the press as an exciting young composer. In 1938, at twenty-five, he destroyed everything he had written before 1935. Almost every first performance he received took place in Derbyshire or Nottinghamshire, most of them in a music room converted from the stables at Brookhill; by his own count the BBC broadcast seven items of his music in a working lifetime, and what he could not get published he printed at his own expense. His music was effectively unheard for the forty years after his death, and the recordings and performances of the last decade are the first sustained attempt to hear it as a body of work.
A full account of his life, in fourteen chapters, is on the biography pages, with a list of sources giving the document behind every statement in it.