Ronald Corp’s first collection of popular evergreens (7/96) has been – to the surprise of some – one of Hyperion’s biggest successes, rightly a prize-winner. Here is a 76-minute collection just as delightful, for quite clearly the supply of catchy and popular numbers that we all know but can rarely identify, shows no sign of drying up. Not many, I imagine, would fail to recognize the signature tune to BBC Radio 4’s soap-opera, The Archers, yet how many could name its title and composer? In fact it is Barwick Green by Arthur Wood, and from AML’s highly informative notes I am surprised to find that this Yorkshire composer was thinking of an actual place near Leeds, nowhere near the Archers’ Ambridge. I am surprised, too, that there are passages in this brief piece that I had never heard, lolloping along with Chinese blocks clicking, in echo of Boys and girls come out to play.
Radio and television signature tunes figure prominently, from Eric Coates’s Knightsbridge March onwards, chosen in the early 1930s to introduce the pioneering radio magazine programme, In Town Tonight. I hadn’t realized that the Trio tune for Haydn Wood’s The Horse Guards March is the signature tune for Down your Way. I am delighted too that Ronald Binge’s Sailing by is included, the soothing piece that lulls you to sleep before the final weather forecast on Radio 4 at night, here given a refined, slightly more expansive performance than in the BBC’s version. May I here suggest that when Ronald Corp plans his next volume – which he certainly must – he goes to Radio 4 at the other end of the day, and includes Fritz Spiegl’s brilliant UK Theme, with its fascinating counterpointing of Annie Laurie and the Londonderry Air, a piece now outrageously mangled every morning, thanks to an extended shipping forecast.
What comes out from every one of these 20 pieces is not just their catchy memorability and tunefulness, but the brilliance and subtlety of the instrumentations. They are full of the sort of effects that only a really practical musician, close to players, could think up, and are here made the more enjoyable by the warmth and clarity of the sound. Not surprisingly AML in his potted biographies confirms just what professionals all these composers were. And how glad I am that Elgar is this time included with one of his lesser-known pieces, Carissima, not to mention Benjamin Frankel with the jaunty Carriage and Pair, with its clip-clopping rhythm, vividly evoking the period Parisian atmosphere of the film, So long at the fair. A must for anyone at all given to nostalgia.'