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With the death earlier this year of Reg Leopold
Britain lost the last of its ‘Violinist Entertainers’, as the
writer Margaret Campbell once classified them. Most were at one
time household names, from Albert Sandler to Max Jaffa, and they
led the Spa, Palm Court and hotel bands that flourished for a
couple of generations. Many, like Leopold, recorded widely and
some, like Sandler, earned a fortune as the Scottish born violinist
Henri Temianka – who employed a group of such musicians, including
Sandler, in his own chamber orchestra – once had occasion ruefully
to remark. He earned next to nothing by comparison.
Tom Jenkins has rather slipped the net and there
are probably two reasons for this. Firstly he recorded relatively
sparsely and secondly his fame was brief and came in the declining
years of the milieu. He was born in Leeds in 1910 and at twenty-five
joined the Hastings Municipal Orchestra at their conductor, Julius
Harrison’s request. For the next few years he played the odd concerto
engagement with the orchestra and followed the usual migratory
travels for British orchestral musicians of the time; seasonal
spa work and light music. In 1936 he joined J.H. Squire’s very
popular Celeste Octet, a launching ground for many string talents,
and his employer arranged for him to take lessons from the now
London resident Carl Flesch (Jenkins had earlier studied with
Edward Maude, leader of the Leeds Symphony Orchestra and with
Charles Woodhouse, the long time leader of Henry Wood’s Proms).
Jenkins was appointed to lead the orchestra of the Grand Hotel
Eastbourne in 1938, which typically comprised a solo violin, two
violins, viola, cello, bass, piano and organ/celeste. Prestigious
positions followed with the BBC Salon Orchestra and the Grand
Hotel, after Sandler’s miserably early death, but the biggest
move was a projected one to lead Beecham’s RPO, thwarted by Jenkins’
illness – a lung was removed and, weakened, he took a position
as an orchestral player. He died in 1957, like Sandler before
him still in his forties.
All of Symposium’s material derives from off-air
recordings on acetates, stored at the Jenkins home. He had presumably
never played them again and most are in a slightly rough state
of preservation; scratches, scuffs, occasional minor groove damage,
but a number valuably complete with self announced items allowing
one to hear his attractive speaking voice. The music is standard
light fare of the day. The first track is the only pre-War one
and in it one can appreciate the light ease of execution even
if it’s not note perfect. The Wieniawski is rather metronomic
but the Sam Franko arrangement of the Sinfonia – the so-called
Arioso – shows some noble phrasing, crystalline in the upper register,
if with a couple of clipped notes at phrase endings and swelling
vibrato. He’s well suited to the Ries – there’s a reprise later
on with cellist Reginald Kilbey – which is bold and assertive
but I wish he’d forgotten loyalty and ditched the cellist’s florid
arrangement of the Schubert and played it straight. Far too much
of the potted plant about this one. In the Chopin his slide is
discreet, his vibrato can be slowish in speed and narrow, and
he can tend toward the salon swoon tremulousness in tonal production
– that is apposite stylistically but objectively worrying. He
locates the piece’s heart just before his interpolated and extravagant
cadenza. His Kreisler rather disappointed me – a mite predictable
– and his Suk Burleska is taken at a cautious clip. He is joined
by Dorothy Bond for Offenbach – a rather piping light English
coloratura but one that can go vertiginously high (no wonder she
interpolated that famous missing high note for Grandi). Jenkins
sits out the Coates and the band is on show for the Edward German
in best operetta style. Finally there is the gypsy smear of the
full band in Dobra Dobra, a rather intoxicating number; it’s not
Lakatos, of course, but it’s not bad.
The notes are affectionate, frank and direct
us to the fairly recent biography of Jenkins by Peter Pugh and
Duncan Heath. Discographical details are rather messy and I’ve
done the best I can. It might seem incongruous to have Jenkins
as Number XI in Symposium’s Great Violinists series but light
music has its own great exponents, of whom Jenkins was assuredly
one.
Jonathan Woolf
Tom Jenkins (violin) with