Cecil Coles: Music From Behind The Lines

Cecil Coles was born in Kirkcudbright which was why I bought this lovely CD - I live not far away.Lovely redicovered romantic music full of great tunes of the late Victorian era. How can you write such stuff when all around you the world is dieing? Much of it was written in the trenches, and the recovered manuscripts were mud and even blood-stained in places. Coles himself, alas, was killed by a German sniper.

Excellent

Cecil Coles was a courageous and brave man. I personally salute his fervor and skill as a composer writing as he did in the most unbelievably difficult of situations yet at the same time producing music of beauty and depth. Fabulous release to the memory of one who served his country.

I'm glad to know this forgotten Scottish composer who died at the battle of Somme in WW 1. "Behind the lines is very impressive orchestral works, and is the most famous among his music. Great Britain lost two important composers in the Great War, one was Cecil Coles and another was George Butterworth.

Bought this after being 'sold' on the WW1 blurb. Sadly the music is pretty ordinary. Technically proficient but not an individual voice such as Gurney or Butterworth.

George Butterworth was probably the most famous British composer to have been killed in the First World War; his "The Banks of Green Willow" and his settings of Housman's "A Shropshire Lad" have become part of the established classical repertoire. This CD features the music of a much less well known casualty of that war, Cecil Frederick Coles (1888 -1918). One reason that Coles is so little known is that his output was so small; this one disc contains most of his known works. The slightness of his oeuvre was not the inevitable consequence of his early death; his life was, after all, only one year shorter than that of Schubert, one of the most fabulously prolific composers of all time.Although the disc is entitled "Music from Behind the Lines", only one piece, the incomplete suite "Behind the Lines" itself, was actually composed while Coles was on active service. Most of the other works, in fact, were written while he was studying and working in Germany between 1907 and 1913; it is ironical that he should have been killed fighting against the country where he had spent several years of his life and where he doubtless had many friends. Several of his works were originally published under German titles; the "Comedy of Errors Overture", for example, started life as "Die Komödie der Irrungen".Dr Jeremy Dibble who wrote the accompanying sleeve notes states that he considers the "dramatic scena" for baritone and orchestra, "Fra Giacomo", to be Coles' best work, although with respect I cannot agree. There is nothing wrong with the music itself, which is suitably dramatic to match this lurid tale of adultery, jealousy, murder and revenge set in mediaeval Italy, but I could not help wishing that Coles had found a text more worthy of his talents. It is by the obscure poet Robert Williams Buchanan, and on the basis of this poem (and the few other poems of his I have been able to track down) I would say that his obscurity is well deserved.Coles' other vocal work is his "Four Verlaine Songs", settings for soprano and orchestra of four poems by a much more prominent literary figure, the French poet Paul Verlaine, although he sets them in English translation rather than the original French. Here I felt that the music was not always well-matched to the words; the setting of "A Slumber Vast & Black" was surprisingly noisy for a poem which ends with the line "No noise, no noise". Probably my favourite amongst these was "Let's Dance the Jig!" in which the title line (in French "Dansons la gigue!") is less an exclamation of joy or celebration than of defiant stoicism in a poem about unhappy love.On the whole I preferred his purely instrumental works. The suite "From the Scottish Highlands", an early work dating from his late teens, is a celebration of his homeland. (Coles, born in Kirkcudbright and educated in Edinburgh, was himself a Scot, although not a Highlander). It is very short- the three movements together only last about ten minutes- but in those movements Coles reveals a wonderful gift for melody. I felt that the musical ideas contained here could easily have been expanded into something of greater, perhaps symphonic, length. Coles never wrote a symphony, but the "Scherzo in A minor" may originally have been intended as part of one. "The Comedy of Errors" starts off rather portentously, but is otherwise as merry and exuberant as one would expect of an overture inspired by one of Shakespeare's most light-hearted comedies."Behind the Lines" is another orchestral suite, this time inspired by the war itself. We know that it originally contained four movements, but of these only two have survived, and only one, “L’Estaminet du Carrefour”, a sound-picture of a French inn, in orchestrated form. The other, "Cortège", played here in an orchestration by the conductor Martyn Brabbins, is a depiction of a funeral procession. To me it was the most moving piece on this disc, an eloquent expression of noble grief on the death of a comrade-in-arms and a portent of the composer's own ultimate fate.With any composer who died young the question invariably arises of "What might he have achieved if he had lived?" This question is, of course, unanswerable, and in Coles' case even more so because it really combines two quite different questions, namely "What might Coles have achieved had he survived the war unscathed?" and "What might he have achieved had there never been a war?" The history of music (and of the other arts) in the twentieth century would have been very different if that century had been a peaceful rather than a war-torn one. His style struck me as rather conservative, looking backwards towards the Romanticism of the late nineteenth century rather than forwards towards what the twentieth was to bring; the man influences seem to be Elgar, Mahler, Tchaikovsky and even Brahms, and he might have found himself at odds with a post-war world dominated by avant-garde Modernism. On the other hand, his own style may have evolved in a more Modernist direction under the influence of his contemporaries. Either way, Brabbins deserves our congratulations for reviving interest in this forgotten figure.

Excellent and moving music by a little known Great war composer.

Very interesting. Sad he was lost to the Great War.