Light Music

Like every year, the Vienna Musikverein welcomes the musicians of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra to its great hall! German conductor Christian Thielemann will be the man with the baton for the traditional 2019 New Year concert, which will open with Carl Michael Ziehrer’s Schönfeld Marsch op.422. Named as musical director of the imperial court balls in 1907, putting an end to the Strauss dynasty’s tenure in this position, Ziehrer wrote around 600 compositions for orchestra (waltzes, polkas, marches etc.) and 23 operettas, including the Schönfeld Marsch. Named as the head of the Viennese orchestra for the first time, succeeding many renowned conductors (from Daniel Barenboim to Lorin Maazel, Nikolaus Harnoncourt or Gustavo Dudamel), Thielmann is familiar with the Strauss dynasty’s repertoire - he recorded (amongst others) An Alpine Symphony, Op. 64 and Der Rosenkavalier (The Knight of the Rose) in March 2011 with the Wiener Philharmoniker. For this concert, which is broadcast in 92 countries, he leads the most beautiful of repertoires from the Strauss era (Künstlerleben op. 316, Die Tänzerin. Polka française op. 351, Lob der Frauen. Polka Mazur, op. 315…). © Sandra Dubroca/Qobuz

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Howard Hanson composed only one opera, Merry Mount, first heard in an out-of-town tryout in Ann Arbor in 1933 and produced at the Metropolitan Opera in New York on February 10, 1934. Critical and audience response to Merry Mount, which included a sizeable radio broadcast audience that also tuned into the premiere, was overwhelmingly positive, but posterity has not been kind to this work. Hanson extracted a popular orchestral suite from Merry Mount, and later in life presented a couple of cut-down concert performances of the opera. Here, conductor Gerard Schwarz, the Seattle Symphony, and an expert cast, including soprano Lauren Flanigan and baritone Richard Zeller, present the first complete modern recording of Merry Mount for Naxos, as recorded at a live concert performance held in Seattle in honor of Hanson's centenary in 1996. Merry Mount is an American opera that deserves hearing; the music is exceedingly well-crafted, serious, and the dramatic structure and story are involving. Schwarz, who has recorded the suite from Merry Mount as part of his Hanson edition for Delos, is deeply dedicated to this production, and the choral singing is outstanding, particularly that by the Northwest Boychoir. Stylistically Hanson's music is very direct and wedded to the ebb and flow of the tale told, which is anything but "merry," being a dark narrative of ascetic Puritans, lusty Cavaliers, hostile Indians, star-crossed love, and demonic possession taken from Twice Told Tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne. The plot summary included in the booklet is rather dense and reproduced in tiny print; however, the opera is in clearly understandable English, so English speakers might just want to toss the book aside and listen. The sound is better than adequate in reproducing the performance and making the singing clear, although one could wish for a little more response in the low end. © TiVo

The primary audience for this disc will be located in Britain, where the music will all have the distinctive half-familiarity of television and radio themes, but even non-British listeners can have a good time with the music. The situation in Britain was different from in America, where by the 1950s a good deal of music written for television had been stamped by popular idioms. Here, although a few pieces were written specifically for broadcast purposes and a few others came from the vast libraries of stock themes employed by British broadcasters, most of the music had an independent existence prior to being attached to a specific broadcast show. American television producers also drew on preexisting music, of course (it's hard, if you're of a certain age, not to think of Chet Huntley when you hear the scherzo of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9), but not to the same extent. Thus the album includes music by such famed figures as Ralph Vaughan Williams and Eric Coates in addition to composers more closely associated with British light music genres. Marches, waltzes, and related locomotive genres are well represented on the program, and listeners interested in knowing what they're getting into here can sample the sprightly but circumspect Out of the Blue March, track 16, by Hubert Bath. It wasn't intended as the theme for a television sports program, but that's what it became. Why? It has the qualities that television music still has today: it's both interesting enough and deferential enough that if you hear it day in and day out it begins to seem like an old friend rather than making you tired of it. Almost all the music on the disc has this quality, which should give British listeners a trip down memory lane and provide non-Britons with pleasant listening that may also illuminate some of the wasys classical music found its way into vernacular musical life in the last century. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Paul Murphy and Gavin Sutherland plays with a slightly sentimental enthusiasm that's entirely appropriate to the circumstances, and the studio recording avoids a big concert-hall sound that could have stultified the music. Recommended to anyone Anglo or just anglophilic. © TiVo

The constantly changing face of the countryside has had a great effect on British writers and painters and there can not be that many landscapes that have not inspired or influenced, at least, one famous painter or author. Favourite songs form the world of broadcasting, along with some of the best of British light music create an album with a distinctly country flavour, from Barwick Green (The Archers) to the Sleepy Lagoon (Desert Island Discs). A delightful evocation of English country life.