ON THE RIGHT TRACK: Classic Railway Music.
Various orchestras, ensembles and soloists.
Available only from
This England, PO Box 52, Cheltenham, Glos, GL50 1YQ
(tel 01242 515156; www.thisengland.co.uk).
sales@thisengland.co.uk
CD (TRC) £7.95, MC (TRT) £5.95, both inclusive of p&p.
Railways and the music they inspire have had a fascination for some 170 years.
Every country, it seems, has contributed its share of railway music, Britain
more than most. This often seeks to reproduce characteristic train rhythms
and unsurprisingly therefore is particularly suited to music's lighter forms
- pop, jazz, dance music of all kinds and so on, though "classical" railway
music is by no means unknown. This attractive release, in which the musical
items are linked by railway sounds and rounded off by Reginald Gardner's
amusing (spoken) Trains commentary, presents vintage recordings of
mainly British pieces, ranging from On the 5.15 (dating from 1914),
through popular dance band numbers of the twenties and thirties and a couple
of Sidney Torch's solos on theatre organ (George Scott-Wood's Flying
Scotsman is particularly ingenious) to - and this is for me the highlight
of the issue - seven (out of many more at the time and since) marvellously
entertaining British light orchestral miniatures of the thirties and forties:
Coronation Scot (Vivian Ellis), most familiar of them all and in the
Sidney Torch Orchestra's famous version of 1948; Golden Arrow (Jack
Beaver, a less known figure, but important in his day); Rhythm on Rails
by Charles Williams; Clive Richardson's Running Off the Rails; Jack
Coles' Seaside Special; Anthony Mawer's Riviera Express; and
Sidney Torch, once again, his composition WagonLit. A variety of titles,
then, though the music, deliciously tuneful and well crafted though it is,
displays a family likeness. But railway buffs and admirers of the British
achievement in light music will love this trip down Memory Lane (or should
that be Memory Track?). The transfers have been well done; I would have welcomed
a note of the date of each recording.
Philip Scowcroft
See also Philip's article Railways
in Music
