Concerts

The Radio Times synopsis names the whole team: Richard Austin conducting, Charles Lynch as soloist, HAROLD FAIRHURST leading the orchestra, and EUGENE GOOSSENS as producer of the broadcast. Fairhurst gave the London premiere of the Elegiac Trio op. 32 four years later and was paid a fee of fourteen guineas out of the Brookhill household account in December 1943; Goossens conducted The Cenci at the Scala twenty years later. Coke wrote his own note for the billing: 'Although Roger Coke is only twenty-six, he has already written nearly forty works. His Second Symphony, dedicated to Rachmaninoff, is to be produced by Eugene Goossens at Cincinnati shortly. This concerto, composed last autumn, is a frankly romantic work. "If one looks for a spiritual forbear", writes the composer, "one is reminded of Rachmaninoff's First; this, however, does not mean that the concerto is at all like anyone else's, or at all conservative or unadventurous in its idiom or procedure."' Nothing in the surviving papers says whether the Cincinnati performance took place. The British Music Society gives Coke as the soloist; the other and more reliable sources give Charles Lynch. Four of the reports are dated only approximately: the Radio Times (July or August 1939), the British Music Society (September 1992), the Derbyshire Countryman (April or May 1957) and Musical Opinion (September 1939).