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Richard ADDINSELL (1904-1977)
Goodbye Mr Chips – Theme (1939) [3:19]
Invitation Waltz (Ring round the Moon) (1950) [3:39]
The Smokey Mountains Concerto (1950) [15:25]
The Isle of Apples (1940) [5:47]
The Prince and the Showgirl – selection (1957) [5:59]
Tune in G (1943) [4:55]
Tom Brown’s Schooldays – Overture (1951) [7:54]
Festival (1947) [5:06]
Journey to Romance (1955) [3:37]
Fire over England – suite (1937) [8:30]
A Tale of Two Cities – Theme (1958) [3:43]
Philip Martin, Roderick Elms (piano)
BBC Concert Orchestra/Kenneth Alwyn
Rec. 20-21 April 1994, The Golders Green Hippodrome, London
NAXOS 8.555229 [68:16]

This is a straight re-issue on Naxos of the 1994 recording originally released on Marco Polo as part of their valuable British Light Music series. The Naxos re-release features a rather breezy but utterly irrelevant cover image – the original Marco Polo’s still from Tom Brown’s Schooldays was much more apt. But that’s about the only quibble I have. This is a really excellent disc. The Marco Polo series was valued and valuable in releasing modern digital recording of classic Light Music scores. However, this sometimes came at the price of orchestras or even conductors not wholly comfortable with the idiom. Here we have the ever-excellent BBC Concert Orchestra under the experienced and idiomatic baton of Kenneth Alwyn. Alwyn died in December 2020 so this is a fitting tribute to a skilled and sensitive musician whose work was too easily taken for granted.

Although this is part of the light music series, by rights it should be considered more of a film and Incidental score compilation with some forty minutes of the disc drawn from Addinsell’s extensive catalogue of film, radio and stage scores. These same artists produced a neatly complimentary disc of music for the now-defunct ASV which included further scores including Addinsell’s “greatest hit”, The Warsaw Concerto from the film Dangerous Moonlight. That work appears on literally hundreds of discs, so its absence is actually to be applauded. I cannot praise the playing and the conducting here too highly. It really is a joy to hear an orchestra completely at home with the idiom of light music and film scores. Somehow, I had missed this disc in its original incarnation so I have been delighted both by the range of the music and the manner of its performance. Perhaps one of the most valuable scores restored on this disc is the fifteen minute The Smokey Mountains which is in effect a three movement piano concertino. Played here by the assured and unfussy Philip Martin this is light music of the highest order – simple yet appealing, sophisticated in its understated directness. The work was commissioned (probably) for American pianist Leo Litwin who had championed and recorded the Warsaw Concerto with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops. Litwin recorded a cut solo version of the concerto but the implication in the notes is that this disc is the first complete recording of the full orchestral score. The themes are in the style of American folk song – at one moment I was reminded of Morton Gould’s Shortening bread from his Spirituals for String Choir and Orchestra. Certainly the spirit of this open-hearted work is home-spun Americana and its relative neglect is a surprise. I could imagine this being very successful at any orchestral ‘pops’ concert. The Isle of Apples that follows was written as a score to a radio play about King Arthur and is about as close to the English Pastoral Tradition as Addinsell ever got. The six minute suite that follows from the famous film The Prince and the Showgirl is another delight. This displays Addinsell’s skill in more of a musical theatre genre. Afficionados of light music will recognise the name of arranger Felton Rapley and orchestrator Douglas Gamley. Roy Douglas – latterly famous for his work helping Vaughan Williams at the end of that great composer’s life – arranged the aforementioned Isle of Apples.

In more recent years the name of Philip Lane has become synonymous with the reconstruction and editing of many great British film scores and much other light music besides. Lane is one of the most knowledgeable living experts in the field of light music and film score reconstruction. Here, Lane contributes a really excellent liner note full of detail and insight as well as having arranged the Overture for the aforementioned Tom Brown’s Schooldays. This overture displays all of Addinsell’s talent in one fell swoop. Lane describes – aptly – the music as Eric Coates out of Haydn Wood but Addinsell succeeds in writing a main tune that is both memorable and original while seeming to be oddly familiar. As Lane puts it, if Addinsell had had to write a “school song” for Tom Brown’s school it would have probably sounded exactly like this. And that in a nutshell is why Addinsell is so good at both film scores and incidental music. He has that happy knack of being able to encapsulate an appropriate dramatic mood in a few telling musical brush-strokes. Some great film composers write remarkable scores but always sound like themselves – Korngold is the prime example. Franz Waxman is a musical chameleon and Addinsell is similarly stylistically flexible albeit in a narrower overall musical range. I love the Cole-Porter-esque urbane beguine that is Festival which starts with a brooding orchestral and solo piano introduction before slipping into a typically light music slicked-back beguine. Without wishing to over-state the skill of all the performers; this is exactly the kind of piece which on paper can look very simple to play. But the BBC Concert Orchestra have this style of repertoire in their bones – the easy swinging beguine rhythm flows to perfection with the off-beat accents propelling the music forward at Kenneth Alwyn’s ideal tempo. Likewise soloist Philip Martin’s “the pianist entertains” easy keyboard style is smilingly apt. Only when you hear this music (or something similar) played by less honed ensembles do you realise how easy it is to get it ‘wrong’. I do not recognise the name of engineer Ray Piling or producer Tim McDonald but again they achieve an ideally balanced and detailed recording in the BBC CO’s old home at the Golders Green Hippodrome – even the name of the venue is redolent of an earlier age!

Two more highlights on a disc where there are no low-lights are the Fire over England Suite and the theme from A Tale of Two Cities that closes the disc. Fire over England is another famous film dealing with the life and times of Queen Elizabeth I. This is no Korngoldian Elizabeth and Essex swash-buckling score but its a very attractive suite with elements of fife and drum rubbing shoulders with a rather sinuous tango and a heraldic fanfare or two – again the different elements of the score so well presented by the orchestra. The arranger here is George L. Zalva – another name very familiar to light orchestral music selections from the fifties on. A Tale of Two Cities features the ever excellent Roderick Elms on solo piano and this is much closer to the heart-on-sleeve Romanticism of the Warsaw Concerto with sweeping string melodies over virtuosic piano figurations. A wonderful completion of a delightful disc from first to last. I must admit to having rather taken Addinsell’s output for granted – this disc has single-handedly reignited my interest in this composer – a hugely enjoyable voyage of discovery.

Nick Barnard