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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.

1951

Concert

21st JanuaryBrookhill Hall

Performers
Roger Sacheverell Coke (piano) Barbara Welby (soprano)
Programme
Coke
15 Variations and Finale for piano in C minor, Op. 37
Coke
Songs (When the lamp is shattered; Invocation; I dreamed that as I wandered; The Charming Month of May; November Afternoon)
Coke
Piano Sonata No. 1 in D minor, Op. 12 (withdrawn)
Notes
Two listings of the same concert, recorded separately, are combined here. A fourth report date, in 1951 but with neither day nor month recorded, could not be matched to a publication. The Free Press announced the recital two days beforehand and named the soprano as Barbara Lind. That was one of her own names rather than a mistake: she was born Barbara Angela Mary Lind Gregory, a descendant of Jenny Lind, and married Sir Oliver Welby in 1927. She is billed as Barbara Lind on Coke's typescript programmes for both of his Wigmore Hall concerts in October 1950.
Source
Free Press, 19 January 1951 — Coke0178
Provenance
Manuscript front cover, Coke's Scrapbook (Coke0142–Coke0296)

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