The Golden Age of Light Music: Musical Kaleidoscope Vol. 2

The Golden Age of Light Music series issued by Switzerland's Guild label hits 40 volumes with this disc. Guild has done a yeoman's job in bringing to light the almost completely neglected repertoire known to Europeans as light music and to Americans as pops or easy listening -- the slippery genre boundaries are but one of the many fascinating aspects of this repertory. A few discs in the series have been devoted to individual orchestra leaders, but most have been organized thematically (Reflections of Tranquility, Continental Flavour). By now the compilers have accumulated quite a number of 78 rpm discs that don't quite fit anywhere else, and the result has been a pair of Musical Kaleidoscope discs, of which this is the second. You might think these would make good samplers for the curious, but actually one of the thematic discs would be preferable for that purpose -- the skill of the arrangers in the genre emerges when one hears how differently Mantovani, Melachrino, and Percy Faith treat the idea of a night in the gardens of Spain, for instance. The Amor Amor disc makes a good introduction. Those already involved in the series will find some gems here, however. The program is a grab bag, with two discrete groups of pieces, miniatures and dramatic interludes, placed among an assortment of other recordings. Among the highlights are pieces by two musicians and leaders not much heard as yet in the series: Dutch composer Dolf van der Linden and the orchestra leader George Liberace, brother to the more famous American pianist. The miniatures, mostly known to British audiences from their use as background music for specific recurring segments of British television programs, are less rewarding for those without that frame of reference, but the "Drama, Menace and Excitement" section that closes out the disc, while it might not fulfill the booklet's promise to leave the listener "excited and shocked," is lots of fun and illuminates the meeting points between this music and the film score tradition. As usual, the remastering job is top-notch. One complaint here is that the notes are incomplete; pleading space limitations, they omit composers who have been treated earlier in the series -- hardly a satisfactory solution, for even libraries are unlikely to buy the whole series. The page-long listing of the discs available in the series could easily have been relegated to the web.