Albert Coates (musician)

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Albert Coates (April 23, 1882 - December 11, 1953) was an Anglo-Russian conductor and composer.

He was born in St. Petersburg in Russia, the youngest of seven sons of an English (Yorkshire) 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 the Dresden Court Opera, and became conductor at St 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 Gustav Holst's The Planets.

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 Ninth Symphony 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 1925 he gave the first stage performance outside Russia of Rimsky-Korsakov's opera The Invisible City of Kitezh.

His works as composer, now little remembered, include the operas Samuel Pepys and Pickwick. He wrote an elaborate symphonic poem The Eagle, dedicated to the memory of his former teacher Artur Nikisch, which was performed in Leeds in 1925. In 1946 he settled in South Africa, where he died.

Albert Coates was no relation to Eric Coates, the English light music composer, or to the tenor singer John Coates.