The Golden Age of Light Music series, a project of Switzerland's Guild label, resurrects a music that was once available anywhere music was sold and is now almost completely neglected -- the genre known as light music in Europe, and often as easy listening in the U.S. Many of its practitioners were conservatory trained, and although the genre takes popular tunes as starting places, it is in many respects a cultivated classical tradition -- something its European admirers seem to understand better than Americans do. The interested listener can pick and choose from among discs chronologically organized, those devoted to specific arrangers or song composers, those devoted to specific musical types, or thematic discs like the present Light Music for All Seasons, featuring pieces suggested by spring, summer, fall, or winter. The thematic discs may be preferable for buyers who wish to sample the series; the charm of the form, with the composer's canvas circumscribed to the length of a 78 rpm record, lies in small details, and here the listener can hear the different ways arrangers brought a specific theme to life. Brilliant touches of orchestration abound here, from the gorgeous
Michel Legrand version of April in Paris that opens the disc to the arrangement of One Morning in May by Canadian-born
Robert Farnon, whom
André Previn once called the greatest living writer for strings. Hear how the ultimate entry of the main melody of the song in the strings is delayed in that three-minute masterpiece as the composer leads the listener into a world of reawakening nature and emotions. The disc includes music not only from well-known orchestra leaders such as
Legrand and
George Melachrino, but also obscure figures such as
Roberto Inglez and an actually Scotsman,
Robert Ingliss, who specialized in Latin sounds! Some of these more obscure figures are briefly described in the booklet, but others, such as Ludo Philipp, are ignored without explanation -- hardly an ideal circumstance in a release designed to reintroduce forgotten music. The remastering job, however, is fine as usual, and there are several specific delights that make the disc worth having in themselves -- the
Ethel Smith organ version of Sleigh Ride, which manages to make that holiday chestnut seem fresh out of the fire, and
Melachino's beautifully assembled six-minute Christmas Fantasy.