Guild’s new Light Music
series opened with an Introduction to
the genre [review];
the next two move forward decade by
decade. The 1940s saw the emergence
of a new generation of composers and
arrangers; some, like Robert Farnon
had cut their teeth on the service bands
that proliferated during the War whilst
others like Stanley Black had been active
as instrumentalists and arrangers in
the demi-monde between light music arranging
and after hours bottle-club jazz gigs
(accompanying tenor saxophonist Coleman
Hawkins on record was not the least
of Black’s distinctions). Of course
the older guard – Eric Coates, Charles
Williams, both excellent string players
as well as composers – still held their
place as did the Palm Court pleasantries
of Albert Sandler. But Canadian Robert
Farnon and English-born David Rose led
the way with a dazzling command of the
modern light orchestra and arrangements
of versatility and ebullience – as well
as exhibiting the necessary ability
to concentrate those moments into a
four minute span. Radio and the post-war
resumption of mass recording fed the
enthusiasm for music of this kind and
some of the results can be heard here.
Highlights there are
a-plenty from the concertante violin
part in Sidney Torch’s arrangement of
Music in the Air to the pizzicato
drive of Charles Williams’s playing
of Melody on the Move (the orchestral
pizzicato was a feature of David Rose’s
arrangements). Geraldo interpolates
an atmospheric harp into Rodgers and
Hammerstein’s Out of My Dreams whilst
Stanley Black spices Linda Chilena
with real exotica. Who is the Louis
Kaufman-like fiddler player in Morton
Gould’s Laura? Rose’s Manhattan
Square Dance is a fascinating number
– all pizzicato, pluck and brio and
perky rhythm with its admixture of Khachaturian
and a strongly Anglo-American undercurrent.
Runaway Rocking Horse, played
by the Orchestre Raymonde under Robert
Preston, opens like VW’s Wasps and Woodland
Revel comes courtesy of Melachrino’s
rippling cascades of string choirs.
But it’s Farnon who really stands out;
Canadian Caravan has a silken,
swaying direction nourished with harp
glissandi and high yet vibrant string
writing that fully intoxicates. Still,
the medium of Light Music is a capacious
mansion and welcomes the saucy metropolitan
keyboard stuff of Jack Brown as much
as Peter Yorke’s updated Elgarianisms.
Humour is never far away either and
the arrangement of Ten Green Bottles
leaves one in no doubt that they
have been alcoholically drained – complete
with portentous, pompous brass. Haydn
Wood’s Roving Fancies is winningly
lyrical and delightfully orchestrated
whilst Morton Gould is on hand to pull
out virtuosic stops on Dancing Tambourine
– not as innocently childlike as it
sounds.
As these performances
show the range of Light Music was considerable
and its practitioners and executants
of the highest calibre. As the dawning
of the LP loomed the procedures were
in place for the genre to stake its
renewed place after the privations of
the War and its immediate aftermath.
Jonathan Woolf
The
Golden Age of Light Music - an Introduction
The
Golden Age of Light Music - 1940s
The
Golden Age of Light Music - 1950s
MusicWeb's
British Light Music Composer Garland
pages
GUILD GLCD 5102 [76.41]