These two well-filled discs together represent a collection of what Sir Thomas Beecham liked to call lollipops, musical pieces intended to give sheer pleasure which for the most part succeed admirably in so doing. Some are well known, but others are rather less so, and in fact the compilation is wide enough to tempt many collectors who already possess, say, versions of The Carnival of the Animals, Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance Marches and Vaughan Williams's Greensleeves Fantasia. These bigger pieces are without exception well played—the Saint-Saens Carnival has eight excellent soloists including the clarinettist Michael Collins as ''the cuckoo in the woods''—and are to be found on the first of the two CDs.
The second disc gives us mostly shorter pieces; it begins with a Mill in the Forest by a composer called Eilenberg that is complete with toy instruments, and it continues with 20 further items. These are sometimes by other composers whose works are equally uncharted in the reference books such as Marie (whose La Cinquantaine proves to be a tune everyone knows), Poldini, Jessel (more well-known tunes) and Necke, and elsewhere by such great names as Schubert (with the famous Marche militaire), Mozart and Beethoven. All these pieces, writes Sir Charles Groves cheerfully in the booklet note, are ''fragments which have given pleasure to millions of people the world over … We had enormous fun making this record''. One can imagine other such felicitous medleys, but I think it would be hard to improve on this one which ranges from Leroy Anderson's brilliant Bugler's Holiday, miaowing Waltzing Cat and Plink, Plank, Plonk (which naturally features string pizicato) to Waldteufel's Skaters' Waltz and Khachaturian's celebrated, high-kicking Sabre Dance.
The playing of the Philharmonia Orchestra is vital and uninhibited but at the same time it is highly polished, and the recording made in the Abbey Road Studios and Henry Wood Hall has a brightness that suits the music and an excellent dynamic range. I wish the booklet note to Volume 2 (CO-73674) had told us something about the music, but probably in a record such as this it may be allowed just to speak for itself. For all save those of austere tastes, these are two discs that should give much pleasure, but I hope the outlay on two full-price CDs doesn't deter buyers—although this must have been an expensive issue to make, Denon might have been kinder, even so, to make its unashamed delights accessible at mid price, for there must be a vast market of people who are newly into CD and increasingly ready to cross over into the 'classical' repertory.'