The Hall of Fame is a new sub-series for Guild. The rationale is to present a taster of some of the very best Light Music classics in newly remastered recordings. I’ve no problem with that even though I have the dizzying feeling that these tracks are going around in an endless loop of retitled reissues. Doubtless this is not the case but a look at the roll-call – Lehár, Coates, Coward, Ketèlbey, Percy Fletcher and the like – might lead one to think so. For one thing some of the arrangements and performances may well be new to you. And to finish we do have a mini-salute to another, younger master of the genre, Clive Richardson. ... Why does my spell checker refuse to accept Clive and suggest Clove or Cleeve? Have no Clives been born in the last thirty years?

Clives apart, one can luxuriate in the splendid conjunction of David Rose’s music and Morton Gould’s conducting in Holiday for Strings – ebullient and fizzy. Naturally we get Vivian Ellis’s Coronation Scot and to complete a blockbuster opening trio Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops turn on the glamour for Leroy Anderson’s Serenata. But why stop there; Farnon may now be gone but Portrait of a Flirt is immortal and he serves it up himself with luscious 1948 style.

The Kostelanetz version of Mad About The Boy exploits solo violin, trombone, piano and massed strings, variety being the spice of longing, although it sounds too busy an arrangement. There are however charmers a-plenty to take one’s mind off the near misses. Strachey’s In Party Mood for one or the frolicsome Bubbling Over. Stanford Robinson does his thing with In A Persian Market though it rather lacks the bite of the composer’s own recordings. More up-to date is Camarata’s conducting of the jazz-tinged Brief Interlude. David Rose himself turns up to compress An American in Paris into three minutes. Some would doubtless say that’s an advantage, though maybe the clotted string cream is just too thick, for once.

August Eric Coates was never afraid of transatlantic influence and his syncopated Rhythm, from his Four Centuries suite, has the nerve to half quote Fascinatin’ Rhythm. The Richardson trio includes Outward Bound with its Rimsky hues and the substantial London Fantasia, written in wartime, and featuring Rachmaninovian rhapsody, the Grieg concerto, air raid sirens and a bombing raid. Its lifelike recreation of the sirens and bombing apparently generated adverse comment at the time.

This is another well annotated and transferred disc, slightly treble-suppressant once again. There’s a high ratio of classics here and newcomers in particular will find much to stimulate and entertain.

Jonathan Woolf

 

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