Albert Coates (April 23, 1882 – December 11, 1953) Coates was born in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire, the youngest of seven sons of an English father and a Russian mother. He studied at the conservatory in Leipzig, where his greatest teacher was Artur Nikisch. He worked for a time at Semperoper Dresden, and became conductor at Saint Petersburg's Mariinsky Theatre. He escaped with considerable difficulty from Russia in April 1919. He made his debut at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in 1914 with Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. Dynamic in his approach and especially successful in Russian music, he introduced many new works to audiences, including pieces by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Arnold Bax and Alexander Scriabin, and, perhaps most notably, led the first complete London public performance of The Planets by Gustav Holst. In the 1920s and early 1930s he frequently worked with the London Symphony Orchestra. He made important early contributions to the representation of orchestral music on the gramophone, beginning in 1920 with Scriabin's Poème de l'Extase and afterwards conducting many excerpts from Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen and (in 1925) the complete Symphony No. 9 of Beethoven. He was the conductor for the 1930 premiere recording of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, with Vladimir Horowitz as soloist. In 1924-25 Coates shared conducting duties of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra with Eugene Goossens and was present at the birth of Vladimir Rosing's pioneering American Opera Company. In 1925 he gave the first stage performance outside Russia of Rimsky-Korsakov's opera The Invisible City of Kitezh. His compositions include the operas Samuel Pepys and Pickwick, a piano concerto and a symphonic poem The Eagle, dedicated to the memory of his former teacher Artur Nikisch, which was performed in Leeds in 1925. On November 13, 1936 the BBC broadcast the world's first televised opera, Coates' Pickwick, directed by Vladimir Rosing. Coates and Rosing launched a season of the British Music Drama Opera Company at Covent Garden the following week. When World War II broke out, Coates moved to Southern California. There he founded the Southern California Opera Association with Vladimir Rosing. A number of productions were mounted in conjunction with the W.P.A, among them Coates' opera Gainsborough's Duchess. In 1946 he settled in Milnerton, Cape Town, South Africa, with his wife Vera de Villiers. He died there in 1953. Artists: 
Gwendolyn Avril Coleridge-Taylor (8 March 1903 – 21 December 1998) She was born in South Norwood, London, the daughter of composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. She wrote her first composition, Goodbye Butterfly, at the age of twelve. Later, she won a scholarship for composition and piano at Trinity College of Music in 1915, where she was taught by Gordon Jacob and Alec Rowley. In 1933 she made her debut as a conductor at the Royal Albert Hall. She was then the first female conductor of H.M.S. Royal Marines and a frequent guest conductor of the BBC Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra. She was the founder and conductor of both the Coleridge-Taylor Symphony Orchestra and its accompanying musical society in the 1940s as well as the Malcolm Sargent Symphony Orchestra. Her compositions include large-scale orchestral works, as well as songs, keyboard, and chamber music. In 1957, she wrote the Ceremonial March to celebrate Ghana's independence. Her other well-regarded works include a Piano Concerto in F minor (Sussex Landscape, The Hills, To April, In Memoriam R.A.F.), Wyndore (Windover) for choir and orchestra, and Golden Wedding Ballet Suite for orchestra. She dropped her first name after a divorce, thereafter going by Avril professionally. She spent her latter life in South Africa, where she lived under apartheid and could not work as a composer or conductor because of her one-fourth black African ancestry. She also wrote under the pseudonym Peter Riley. О Франке Лафитте мне ничего не удалось найти, кроме этого интервью.
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Albert Coates
PIANO CONCERTO
Frank Laffitte, piano
London Symphony Orchestra Avril Coleridge-Taylor
1959 (live)
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Запись позаимствована мною на ютубе.
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