Sentimentality, romance, and a sense of humor–all of these things characterized Leroy Anderson’s music, attributes that somehow went missing from much of American classical symphonic repertoire during the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s (except for Bernstein and a few others). And although there’s always an important and enduring place for the more profound, timeless works, there’s also one for music that immediately recalls the sound and sensibility of a period and effectively captures its popular mood. Anderson’s music did exactly that, and if you don’t respond with smiles and toe-tapping enthusiasm when you hear Horse & Buggy, Blue Tango, Summer Skies, The Girl in Satin, China Doll, or Serenata, then you are probably beyond the reach of this light-hearted but seriously entertaining fare, and are sadly disconnected from the schmaltz and slightly tacky but still delightful pleasure of The Waltzing Cat and such classics as The Typewriter, Fiddle-Faddle, The Syncopated Clock, and the still wildly popular Sleigh Ride.
Although the Boston Pops pretty much owned many of these pieces, Frederick Fennell and his Eastman-Rochester Pops (and unnamed London orchestra that plays on nearly half of these 23 tracks) did a more than respectable job, enhanced by the unsurpassed audio engineering of the Mercury Living Presence team–Wilma Cozart, Harold Lawrence, and C. Robert Fine. If you already own the excellent original CD release of this program, and you intend to continue to play it on your regular stereo system, then you won’t find substantial improvement with this new SACD incarnation, which offers these performances for the first time “in their original 3-track versions”. But for SACD aficionados, by all means, get your hands on this and enjoy a renewed appreciation for this label’s integrity and foresight 50 years ago to spare no effort to capture and preserve performances in the manner that its name proclaims–“living presence”. A treasure! [12/9/2005]
