If Eric Coates scarcely needs the pioneering efforts of Marco Polo's British Light Music Series, the series would equally be incomplete without him. Sticking for the most part to well-worn territory, the result will provide joy for anyone—in Bratislava or wherever—who may be new to Coates's music, and it offers uncommonly generous and informative notes by Tim McDonald.
For the most part the marches come off particularly well, with ''Knightsbridge'' and ''Oxford Street'' bouncing along quite splendidly. Perhaps the one disappointment among them is The Dam Busters. Maybe one should not condemn Adrian Leaper for attempting a different approach to such a familiar piece, but whether his pulling around of tempo and dynamics fully succeeds is more questionable. As elsewhere in the series, too, Leaper often misses the snap and precision of the best conductors of this sort of music. Compare, for instance, the sluggish start to The Merrymakers Overture with the crispness of Mackerras or, even more markedly, his turgid ''Covent Garden'' tarantella with that of Groves in the same Classics for Pleasure compilation.
In more restrained mood, Cinderella is quite charmingly done, as is The Selfish Giant—a piece in markedly similar vein that is, I believe, appearing on CD for the first time. Where Leaper scores most, though, is surely in the ''Langham Place'' 'elegie' movement of the London Again suite. The movement pays homage not only to the BBC but also to the Queen's Hall, where Coates played as a young orchestral musician. The Elgarian nobilmente of Leaper's performance is surely just what Coates set out to capture.
The Classics for Pleasure collection remains first choice, then, but admiration for the enterprise of this Marco Polo series remains almost unbounded.'