Publicity Shots - 8514 (c) Kaupo KikkasDrop ShadowSIMONCALLAGHANpianist

Concerts

© Kaupo Kikkas

This is every performance of Coke's music that has so far been traced, from his schooldays at Eton in 1929 to the present, assembled from printed programmes, press notices, Radio Times billings, his mother's household accounts and the composer's own annotations. It is not a complete record and it cannot be: he was played most often in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, sometimes in a converted stable at his own house, and much of that went unreported. There is a gap of twenty-five years between 1987 and 2012 in which exactly one performance has been found. If you know of a concert that is missing, or have a programme, a cutting or a memory of hearing this music, please do get in touch.

1934

Concert & Broadcast

14th March3.15pmBournemouth Pavilion / BBC National Programme / BBC Regional Programme

Performers
Roger Sacheverell Coke (piano) Bournemouth Municipal Orchestra Sir Dan Godfrey (conductor)
Programme
Coke
Piano Concerto No. 2 in E minor, Op. 4 (withdrawn)
Coke
Three String Pieces, Op. 5
Wagner
Lohengrin
Wagner
Klingsor's Magic Garden (Parsifal)
Wagner
The Flower Maidens
Sibelius
Symphony No.1
Notes
Symphony Concert No. 24 of the 39th Winter Series. The Radio Times billing carries a programme note on the Second Piano Concerto, which Coke destroyed four years later, and it is the only description anywhere of how any of the withdrawn music was put together. The concerto "was written in 1933, when the composer was twenty years of age, and has so far received four performances, the first being at the Pump Room, Bath". Its three movements are bound together by a motive heard in the opening introduction which "makes an appearance both in the 'Romance' and the 'Caprice'. Thus, the whole work is imbued with a feeling of continuity." The source writes the two Wagner excerpts as one line, 'Wagner: Lohengrin, Klingsor: Magic Garden'; Klingsor's Magic Garden is from Parsifal, not Lohengrin.
Source
Radio Times billing, 14 March 1934, via BBC Genome — Coke0043 Nottingham Guardian, 8 January 1934 Bournemouth Echo, 9 March 1934 Aberdeen Press and Journal, 14 March 1934 Burnley Express, 14 March 1934 Yorkshire Post, 14 March 1934 Northern Whig, 14 March 1934 The Tatler, 3 January 1934 Western Morning News, 14 March 1934 Western Daily Press, 14 March 1934 Nottingham Evening Post, 14 March 1934
Provenance
Coke's Scrapbook (Coke0142–Coke0296), British Newspaper Archive (Coke0409–Coke0586), BBC Genome (Coke0043)

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