Robert Farnon - Westminster Waltz; Colditz March; State Occasion (Adrian Leaper)

Information

Composer: Robert Farnon

1. Portrait of a Flirt
2. How Beautiful Is Night
3. Melody Fair
4. À la claire fontaine
5. Peanut Polka
6. 3 Impressions for Orchestra (Excerpts): No. 2, In a Calm
7. Gateway to the West
8. Jumping Bean
9. Pictures in the Fire
10. Little Miss Molly
11. Colditz March
12. A Star Is Born
13. The Westminster Waltz
14. 3 Impressions for Orchestra (Excerpts): No. 3, Manhattan Playboy
15. Lake of the Woods
16. Derby Day
17. State Occasion

Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra

Adrian Leaper, conductor

Date: 1991 / 2022

Label: Marco Polo / Naxos

https://www.naxos.com/CatalogueDetail/?id=8.574323

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Review

These 17 short pieces are drawn from among the elite of British style light music. Their dates are mostly scattered throughout the 1940s with outliers in the 1950s and 1970s. They were written by a Toronto-born man who was a prince among light music practitioners. He never lacked for work even when the genre began to stagger. The music sometimes sports a Mantovani sheen and one that found for them a place among Guild’s 135-disc-strong splendid and much-missed Golden Age of Light Music series. Not to forget the Reference Recordings Farnon disc (“Captain Horatio Hornblower RN” RPO/Farnon RR-47CD).

There are plenty of familiar moments including the Westminster chimes in the slippery-gliding polished Westminster Waltz and the unaccustomed gauntness of the Colditz March written later on for BBCTV’s successful Colditz series. Manhattan Playboy has a few Gershwin twists and twirls and streetcar references among Farnon’s usual broad bow-wave melodies. For all his faculty for commercial sheen he never lost touch with his gentle high summer pastoral side, as in Lake of the Woods, How Beautiful is Night, Pictures in the Fire, À la claire Fontaine and In a Calm. Each adds some contrast in what would otherwise have been a little unremitting. Derby Day is full-on again and not as varied as William Alwyn’s overture of the same title. The 1946 State Occasion is a foray into Sovereign pomp and circumstance, much as Haydn Wood’s contemporary marches as well as the Empire March by Montague Phillips. Gateway to the West is among the most satisfying of his pieces and reeks of a confident sunny travelogue of the 1940s cinema ‘shorts’.

The collection launches with the well-practised exhilarations of Portrait of a Flirt. Farnon returns to the theme sometimes in comedic garb. Peanut Polka and Jumping Bean both recall the cinema sing-a-longs when a ball would bounce from word to word on screen to encourage the audience to sing and keep time.

This is good and true to style with a nice mix of moods.

-- Rob Barnett, MusicWeb International

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Robert Farnon (24 July 1917 – 23 April 2005) was a Canadian-born composer, conductor, musical arranger and trumpet player. As well as being a composer of original works (often in the light music genre), he was also commissioned by film and television producers for theme and incidental music, including music for more than forty motion pictures. In later life he composed a number of more serious orchestral works, including three symphonies, a concerto for piano and orchestra, a rhapsody for violin and orchestra and a concerto for bassoon. He was awared four Ivor Novello awards and the Order of Canada.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Farnon

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Adrian Leaper (born 1953) is an English conductor. Leaper studied horn and conducting at the Royal Academy of Music and for eight year was co-principal horn of the Philharmonia Orchestra. He was Principal Conductor of the Orquesta Filarmónica de Gran Canaria (1994-2001) the RTVE Symphony Orchestra in Madrid (2001-2010). He has made many recordings for the Naxos Records label. He has conducted for all four major London orchestras, the Moscow, Vienna and Prague Symphony Orchestras, in addition to many other radio, philharmonic, and symphony orchestras around the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Leaper

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