Britain benefited enormously from expatriate Italian musicians. Both Mantovani and Campoli came to London within a year or so of each other, aged no more than six, as their musician fathers sought better employment prospects. Both men’s careers began similarly; prodigiously talented, early training (in Mantovani’s case at Trinity) and early debuts. Both gravitated towards the light field, restaurants and theatre bands, and grew to fame. Of course Campoli’s ambitions lay elsewhere but Mantovani’s career in light music was long lasting and famously productive.

It helped that he also played the piano and that he had such fine arrangers. It was Ronald Binge who was largely responsible for the Cascading Strings, that glamorous waterfall that was so much a part of the Sound. But there was much else; the standard of musicianship in all sections was high, the songs were snappy and brightly contoured and Mantovani had an ear for piquant colour. So Begin the Beguine is here – of course – as is The Way to the Stars with its fine strings but there’s also the Noel Coward selection, with the Waltz from Blithe Spirit proving to have a sultry wash of fiddles and notable clarinet. Binge’s Whirlwind is rousing stuff and there’s some ruminative, romantic piano in Mantovani’s own September Nocturne. He wrote quite a fair amount, often under pseudonyms, and this one shows his sensitive palette and romantic affiliations. With Flying Saucers (Bees in the Bonnet) we embrace the novelty genre and there’s the tang of the accordion in the promisingly titled El Choclo (Kiss of Fire). We can sample the Binge-Mantovani strings at their most cascading in Love’s Roundabout – and the band at its most soupy in Fibich’s Poème (a performance that would have made a Palm Court fiddler blush). To balance that there’s the rococo charm of Ian Stewart’s The Whistling Boy which like the rest of this programme was recorded in the decade between 1943 and 1953.

Mantovani’s was the top band of its type and here’s a fine selection of its Deccas. I have a strong feeling that the discs could yield more treble than they do in these transfers; there’s been just a little too much noise reduction and that’s squeezed a bit of the air from them. Still, that’s a relatively small matter; there’s no surface noise in compensation.

Jonathan Woolf

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