Ignited memories British light music, reviewed by PATRIC STANDFORD Warner    2564 62020-2

This is a CD for all who have a nostalgia for that particularly British style of light music, for it is rarely featured now on radio stations in the way it was when I was young. In fact my own enthusiasm for music, that essential inspiration which led to me devoting my working life to writing it and talking about it, was not Bach or Beethoven, Wagner, or even, for an adventurous musical child of the early 1950s, Stravinsky or the Second Viennese School, but the light music featured around so many BBC programmes. It was its tunes, its orchestration and often its sheer and very evidently polished skill that made me want to find out how to make it for myself.

It was composers like Robert Farnon (who sadly died earlier this year) [listen -- track 13, 0:00-0:52] and Ronald Binge [listen -- track 9, 0:00-1:02] that first stirred my musical instincts. And many are featured here on this second in the series devoted to what are justifiably called British Classics. Eric Coates and Albert Ketèlby (he who invented the accent in his name to enable a rise above a Birmingham birth), Frederic Curzen and Armstrong Gibbs, Sydney Bains, Peter Hope and Ernest Tomlinson -- all are here with music that so many of us may recognise but often be unable to attribute.

The memories are ignited with the gentleness of Geoffrey Toye's Haunted Ballroom [listen -- track 7, 0:43-1:24] or the vigour of Charles Ancliffe's Nights of Gladness [listen -- track 2, 0:28-1:13]. It may simply be the firelight, the cocoa, and something comforting on the 'wireless' introduced by The Old Clockmaker by Charles Williams [listen -- track 10, 0:00-0:56].

This CD is for all who treasure such memories -- and can admire the skill that goes into the writing of such deceptively simple pieces. And beyond that there is a British Light Music Society under the chairmanship of Ernest Tomlinson, that is a mine of further information.

For help listening to the sound extracts here, please refer to our questions & answers page.

Record Box is Music & Vision's regular series of shorter CD reviews