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Leroy Anderson’s name on a disc cover is pretty much a guarantee of vitality, wit and enjoyment. The only proviso concerns performances. And as with the first volume in Slatkin’s Naxos series the performances are engaging, stylistically apt and full of curvaceous allure. The fact that we have five world premiere recordings – and no mere shavings from the bench at that – is surely even more reason to look favourably on this latest, peppy entrant.
 
A Harvard Festival is one of those premiere recordings. It was composed in 1969 and weaves together student songs with the warmth of Brahmsian undertow. Those sturdy lower strings surely evoke the Academic Festival Overture and amidst the skirl the organ peals with declamatory affirmation. Forgotten Dreams is a relaxed and relaxing morceau and acts in winsome juxtaposition. That old favourite Horse and Buggy is an example of Anderson’s spruce, clean limbed Americana and to follow it with The Waltzing Cat is to invite superlative on superlative. The lissom glissandi of this one acts as an entrée to the further examination of animal life in the racing drama, Home Stretch, packed with vim.
 
March of the Two Left Feet is a relatively late work, dating from 1970 and its captivating, naughty percussion part would test the counting skills of many a practitioner of the art. Whereas the brace of pre-war jazz-tinged pieces takes us back to another time altogether. Jazz Legato has a carefree jauntiness – good tight BBC trumpets – and Jazz Pizzicato digs into the symphonic jazz vogue with whimsical indulgence. Song of the Bells is a tuneful frolic, a ¾ waltz with a touch of South of the Border about it. New to me  - but not a premiere recording – is the arrangement of Where’er You Walk from Handel’s Semele where the protagonist is not a tenor but a trumpeter. Here is Anderson wearing his arranger’s hat – it’s a grand setting, too, with more than a hint of Hamilton Harty about it. The Suite of Carols ends this enterprising, far ranging collection. Here Anderson explores some lightly sprung neo-classicism in his settings. The Wassail Song is especially potent.
 
The disc is excellently played and conducted - and warmly recorded – so Anderson devotees will find much to excite and entertain them.
 
Jonathan Woolf

see also reviews by Ian Lace and John France
 

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