The stage is set immediately by a splendid performance of Balfour Gardiner's Overture to a Comedy, a brilliant and none too familiar piece given a scintillating performance. In the informative insert-notes Michael Hurd suggests that Gardiner did not himself like the Overture, perhaps because he thought it bore too much resemblance to that of Humperdinck's Hansel und Gretel. This I could not see at all: only a brilliant and marvellously scored opening piece.
Even Roger Quilter finds it hard to rival this: yet in their own rather less exuberant way both his Three English Dances and Where the Rainbow Ends suite are masterpieces. Walton's Siesta is familiar enough, and welcome enough; Bax, scoring his own Mediterranean piano piece, treats much the same scene very effectively. Goossens's By The Tarn goes well on multiple strings; originally one of the Two Sketches for string quartet, it seems a pity that the effervescent companion piece, Jack o'Lantern, was not also scored for the larger body; perhaps another day. Peter Warlock's An old song (at seven minutes a large proportion of the composer's orchestral output!) comes off beautifully, and if the final three dances from Edward German's Henry VIII incidental music seem more conventionally lively and popular in style than their companions on the disc then that surely qualifies them ideally to finish off the programme.
The playing of the Northern Sinfonia under Richard Hickox is splendid throughout. Light music of this calibre is nowadays a somewhat neglected field (once upon a time there were excellent spa and seaside orchestras—Bournemouth and Scarborough for example—which ensured that any sort of neglect was out of bounds). But amends are most handsomely made on this very welcome issue.'