Concerts

Coke wrote the premiere on the index page of his own full score: 'Premiere: Dec. 9th 1941, the Composer & Brookhill Symphony Orchestra, conductor Trevor Harvey, at Sutton in Ashfield (Notts.), 66 players.' The site previously gave the place as 'Sutton in Ashford', a slip from this same source. Sixty-six players is the largest force any source attributes to the Brookhill orchestra. Four weeks later, in a letter to Myles Hildyard of 7 January 1942, Coke described the same occasion, the only introduction of the Fourth Concerto the archive records, and gave a different figure: 'introduced my new Fourth Concerto at my Orchestra's Third Concert near here. 500 people came to that and it was a great success, with 55 playing. I also conducted Rachmaninow's (sic.) 2nd Symphony and Barbara Welby sang in my Vocal Concerto, I conducting.' Fifty-five against the sixty-six of his own score: the two figures are not reconciled and both are recorded. The letter also gives an audience of five hundred; the numbering of the Brookhill Symphony Orchestra's concerts, which appears nowhere else in the archive, this being its third; and the rest of the programme, Rachmaninoff's Second Symphony and one of the Vocal Concertos, with Barbara Welby singing and Coke conducting both. Coke does not number the Vocal Concerto. The Second, op. 47, is dated 1942 and was first given, with piano, in May 1942, so the First, op. 25, dedicated to Barbara Welby, is the likelier of the two, but the letter does not say which it was.