At The Drop of A Hat
A Transport Of Delight (97 horse-power
Omnibus)
Song Of Reproduction
(I'm) A Gnu
Design For Living
Je Suis Le Ténébreux
Songs For Our Time - Philological Waltz,
Satellite Moon and A Happy Song
A Song of The Weather
The Reluctant Cannibal
Greensleeves
Misalliance
Kokoraki - A Greek Song;
Madeira, M'Dear?
Hippopotamus (Mud, Glorious Mud)
More Out Of The Hat - Excerpts
Vanessa
Too Many Cookers
Wallace's Private Zoo *
The Hippopotamus Song
The Rhinoceros Song;
The Warthog
The Elephant Song
The opera omnia
for Flanders and Swann devotees is
the three CD set released by EMI in
1990; it contains At the Drop of
a Hat, At the Drop of Another
Hat and The Bestiary of Flanders
and Swann. There have been a number
of CD compilations over recent years
and this Regis entrant swells the
ranks by mining, in the main, At
The Drop of A Hat, adding two
songs from the second album and finishing
with four songs from Wallace's
Private Zoo and sung, of course,
by Ian Wallace.
I can’t fault the
selection; it contains those favourites
no veteran – or indeed neophyte –
would want to be without. It really
now does cost £1 to ride that Monarch
of the Road, or would if there were
any 97hp Omnibuses plying their trade
on the highway. Back in 1957 the figure
must have seemed scandalous. And there’s
still a market, a specialist, audiophile
market, for jokes about hi-fi. "I
never did care for music much – it’s
the hi-fi-delity" is a refrain
that should have one or two high-end
merchants blushing in shame, then
as now. Fibre needles may have been
consigned to the attic of History
but the principle won’t stale.
In our design-obsessed
days, where home makeover programmes
vie with culinary ones for ratings,
Design for Living offers a
cold blast of witty scorn. And listening
to Je Suis Le Ténébreux
gave me pause to wonder whether
Dudley Moore had listened to it before
formulating his own rather more scabrous
pastiches of Benjamin Britten. That
miniature marvel, A Song of the
Weather, a sort of Cycle of the
Months in one minute fifty-two, takes
a necessary place in the cavalcade
of pleasures and rubs up against the
more Tom Lehrer-like charms of The
Reluctant Cannibal. Sometimes
the introductions to the songs might
now strike one as too extended and
inconsistent but when compressed,
as in Misalliance, both take
on a symbiotic beauty of form.
There are two items
from the Second Book – More Out of
the Hat – in which context Vanessa
strikes a rather Noël Coward
pose. Ian Wallace, that characterful
and stalwart buffo, unveils his Private
Zoo with sonorous eloquence and
dash to end an hour and a quarter’s
pure fun.
Jonathan Woolf
An hour and a quarter’s
pure fun ... see Full Review
Michael Flanders with Donald Swann (piano)
