Richard Hayman Orch - ANDERSON: Orchestral Favourites

The world-famous creator of the Christmas standard Sleigh Ride, Leroy Anderson was the eclectic assimilator of many diverse styles. Still remembered with affection from regular airings on radio his works, which show at least superficial kinship to those of David Rose and Robert Farnon, were mini-programmatic scenes of twentieth-century life which transcended the boundaries of conventional salon music. Reflecting the author's vast musical culture they drew on, and often parodied, accepted classical forms, contemporary jazz and dance trends and the works of Gershwin, Aaron Copland and other popular composers. His fine feeling for melody and orchestration, underpinned by inventive and wry-humoured, tongue-in-cheek social commentary, is perhaps best illustrated in The Typewriter (1950), whose unconventional orchestration evokes prim secretaries slaving away in the typing pool.