Coates Conducts Scriabin: The Poem of Ecstasy

Nobody conducts like this anymore, and thank goodness somebody once did.

Albert Coates has been a footnote for so long that it takes an effort of will to remember he was, in his day, a phenomenon — a Russian-trained Englishman (or was it the other way around; his biography resists tidy nationality) who could apparently rehearse an orchestra into a lather and then, on the night, drive it faster than seemed physically possible. Lady Elgar’s verdict — “a bounder,” hogging rehearsal time from the old man himself before the Cello Concerto premiere in October 1919 — has calcified into one of those anecdotes that eats the historical record alive. What actually occupied Coates that week was Scriabin, not Elgar. He was preparing The Poem of Ecstasy for that same concert, and Columbia had him and the LSO in the studio with it within the half-year.

The result, heard now through Pristine’s cleanup, is a fascinating wreck of ambition versus acoustics. You can hear Coates wanting the great trumpet apotheosis to blaze the way it does in memory — in Stokowski’s hands, or Muti’s — and the album horn simply will not give it to him. Nineteen bars vanish somewhere in the process (Mark Obert-Thorn flags the cut in his notes), and yet the tempo relationships tell you everything about the maestro’s temperament: this is quick, urgent, almost impatient Scriabin, unwilling to wallow in the perfumed harmonic stasis that can make the piece sound, in lesser hands, like it’s marking time until the next climax. The Borodin Second that fills out the acoustic side of this survey is comparatively foursquare, but the LSO strings dig in with real Russian grit, or as much grit as a wax horn permits.

Everything after that is electrical, and the difference is not subtle. It never is, moving from acoustic to microphone-era Columbia and HMV — like stepping from a fogged window into daylight, someone else has said, and it remains true.

The Firebird excerpts, cut for HMV in February 1928 — “The Princesses’ Round Dance with the Golden Apples” and the “Infernal Dance of King Kashchei” — arrive with a direct competitive edge, since Beecham had already set down the identical pairing for Columbia over a decade before, in the acoustic dark ages. Coates’s remake was sonically superior enough that Columbia simply withdrew Beecham’s the following year. That’s not sentiment, that’s the marketplace. Musically, the “Infernal Dance” has real teeth — the LSO brass biting into the syncopations — though ensemble frays audibly at a couple of the trickiest corners, the kind of thing a modern producer would insist on patching and 1928 simply let go. There’s something almost bracing about that carelessness now. You hear an orchestra actually playing, not editing.

Two years on, in Kingsway Hall, Coates set down excerpts from The Song of the Nightingale, and the improvement in the engineering is startling — more air around the winds, more presence in the pizzicato, the whole sound stage opened up. Two years. That’s all it took HMV’s engineers to figure out what that room could do.

But the real historical prize here is the Prokofiev — three numbers from The Love for Three Oranges, recorded before Koussevitzky ever got near the composer’s music on disc, which given Koussevitzky’s later ownership of Prokofiev in Boston is a delicious historical inversion. Coates plays it with a kind of unbuttoned glee, the March strutting rather than merely trotting, the Scherzo taken at a clip that has the LSO’s ensemble hanging on for dear life and — just about — winning. It’s not a polished interpretation. It is a thrilling one, and those are not always the same thing, though when you’re lucky they coincide.

Le Pas d’acier, brand new music in the years Coates recorded it — Diaghilev’s Soviet fantasia of hammers and pistons — gets an idiomatic, chugging account that reminds you Coates had no fear of the twentieth century whatsoever. Unlike some of his British contemporaries, who approached Stravinsky and Prokofiev as if handling something that might go off, Coates plunges in.

Transfers, per Pristine’s Andrew Rose and the Obert-Thorn notes, are about as good as this material is going to get — surface noise tamed without strangling the ambience, brass allowed to bite without distortion swallowing it whole. Nobody should mistake this for demonstration sound. But nobody investing in this two-disc set is chasing demonstration sound. They’re chasing Coates — his impatience, his color, his willingness to let an orchestra run a little hot. On that count the set delivers, unreservedly. A genuine document, not a curiosity.