Leroy Anderson - The Complete 1950-54 Recordings, Part 1

Leroy Anderson's career as a composer began almost by chance. He was studying at Harvard for a Ph.D. while conducting the Harvard Band. Impressed by Anderson's arrangements, the manager of the Boston Symphony asked him to arrange a selection of school songs for Harvard night at the Boston Pops. Conductor Arthur Fiedler then invited Anderson to contribute pieces for the Pops repertoire.

Anderson (1908-75) was happy to oblige and the Pops duly premiered his "Jazz Pizzicato" in 1938. The next year, Fiedler recorded that piece in company with another short work, "Jazz Legato," that Anderson wrote to fill out the 78 side. Both showed his considerable gifts for melody and orchestration, along with an interest in novel sounds that would serve him well later on.

Thus began the long association of composer, conductor and orchestra. In this post and its successor, however, we will present not the Boston Pops records, but Anderson's own recordings for American Decca from 1950-54. Today's entry will cover the 17 songs set down in 1950-51. The second post will encompass an additional 18 sides dating from 1952-54.

In toto, we'll examine all his mono recordings, up to but not including his Christmas Carols LP of 1955, all remastered from discs from my collection and Internet Archive, with generally excellent sound. Together, I hope these two posts are a fitting tribute to America's leading exponent of light orchestral music.

Leroy Anderson Conducts His Own Compositions

Anderson's recording career began on September 11, 1950 in a New York studio with a free-lance recording group called "His 'Pops' Concert Orchestra." Anderson programmed eight of his works for this album, with its slightly redundant title Leroy Anderson Conducts His Own Compositions.

Perhaps inevitably, the first selection was "Sleigh Ride," at the time the composer's greatest success, and even today his most recognized work. The first recording of "Sleigh Ride" had been by the Boston Pops in 1949. By the time Anderson gave the downbeat in the Decca studio, lyricist Mitchell Parish had composed the familiar lyrics we often hear today, and the Andrews Sisters had recorded them for Decca. but the composer's effort - and all the recordings we will hear - are instrumentals. (Johnny Desmond's vocal version of "Sleigh Ride" is here.)

Anderson's reading of his work is similar to Fiedler's energetic outing, although the whip effects are less pronounced, and, if anything, the concluding whinny is even more horsey.

Anderson brandishes the bells and orchestral whip heard in 'Sleigh Ride'

The flip side of "Sleigh Ride" was "Promenade," which features a staccato muted trumpet, but nonetheless is a depiction of a stroll in the park, per the publisher. Written in 1945, it was another Boston Pops premiere.

Next up was another famous work, "The Syncopated Clock." Here, Anderson was racing Fiedler to market, the Boston maestro having recorded it in June of 1950, a few months before the composer.

Anderson had written the work while he was in the Army, conducting it in uniform with the Boston Pops in 1945. It shows his genius for wittily incorporating mundane sounds that everyone (at least then) would recognize. Here, too, Parish came up with some lyrics, and the result was recorded by Rosemary Clooney and Eileen Barton. The latter can be heard on my other blog, along with all of the Parish's vocal versions save "Belle of the Ball," which has never been recorded, to my knowledge. (Correction: my knowledge was incomplete. JAC tells me that William Dazeley and Kim Criswell recorded it for the Anderson collection conducted by Leonard Slatkin for Naxos.)

The obverse of "The Syncopated Clock" was another famous item, "The Waltzing Cat," which has the violins providing the unmistakable "meows." Even if you don't know the title, you may recognize the music. Parish wrote lyrics for the piece, and a vocal version unexpectedly came from violinist Florian ZaBach.

Next up was "Serenata," which has no programmatic content, in common with most of Anderson's output. He explained, "[M]ost of the pieces I've written have been melodic, because I happen to like melodic music, and I'm very glad that Arthur Fiedler's favorite piece, he told me, happens to be 'Serenata,' which is a serenade." The B section of this composition is simply gorgeous, and was often heard in the 1950s. Parish wrote lyrics for "Serenata" that have been recorded by Sarah Vaughan, Nat Cole and Mary Mayo.

The discmate for "Serenata" was in another dance form, the ancient "Saraband." Here, Anderson explains, "I have kept the slow triple rhythm of the classical saraband in the melody but the underlying rhythm has been doubled in tempo to produce the effect of the modern foxtrot. In the middle section, however, the slow triple rhythm is heard alone for a while, like an echo of the past."

Anderson wrote "A Trumpeter's Lullaby" for Roger Voisin of the Boston Symphony. "The melody is based on bugle call notes and rhythmical figures which are idiomatic to the trumpet," Anderson said, "but the mood is nevertheless one of a lullaby due to the relaxed playing of the soloist and the quiet background in the orchestra." The military bugle call associations may have had emotional overtones for Anderson and many members of the audience. The first recording was in Boston, followed a few months later by the composer and his New York crew.

Completing the album were the two brief "jazz" pieces - "Jazz Pizzicato" and "Jazz Legato" - that had begun the composer's career.

Leroy Anderson Conducts His Own Compositions, Vol. 2

Decca invited Anderson and the New York musicians back for a session on June 29, 1951 to produce Vol. 2 of the composer conducting his works. The lead-off track was another blockbuster, and another pizzicato specialty, onomatopoeically called "Plink, Plank, Plunk!" Older readers may recall "Plink, Plank, Plunk!" as the theme for the long-running TV game show, I've Got a Secret.

Anderson had finished the piece only a short time before the recording session. "I was going to record the second album, I had two or three weeks to go and there was an eighth side yet to be done," he recalled. But the final composition came to him easily, which was not true of another piece on the album, "Fiddle-Faddle," for which he had discarded three earlier versions.

The exhilarating waltz "Belle of the Ball" is another personal favorite. In his book Harvard Composers, Howard Pollack writes that Anderson's music had taken a turn from the "sly irreverence" of his earliest works to a period that was "more romantic and nostalgic with its 'Belle of the Ball,' 'Horse and Buggy,' 'Summer Skies' and 'Forgotten Dreams'."

We'll get to "Horse and Buggy" in a moment, and the other two items in Part 2 of this series. First, let's discuss what was perhaps Anderson's biggest chart success, "Blue Tango." As a single, it was coupled with "Belle of the Ball," which the composer thought would be the bigger hit. But it was "Blue Tango" that reached the top of the charts. Hugo Winterhalter and Les Baxter also had popular versions, and Mitchell Parish penned lyrics for the piece and "Belle of the Ball." (Vico Torriani's "Blue Tango" vocal version is here - in German.)

Instrumental maestros of the day:
Hugo Winterhalter, Leroy Anderson, Percy Faith

In "Horse and Buggy," the composer returned to the equine theme that had been so popular with "Sleigh Ride." This new piece is highly attractive, with the usual memorable Anderson melody line and the "clip-clop" sound effects provided by temple blocks.

Anderson's thoughts on the next selection, "The Phantom Regiment": "[T]he main idea was to depict a group approaching from the distance and then receding. This is an effective musical device; the best known example is probably the 'March of the Pilgrims' from Berlioz' Harold in Italy. I also used this device in "The Minstrel Boy," one of the numbers in the Irish Suite." The Irish Suite will be included in Part 2 of this series.

"China Doll" has a mild amount of chinoiserie in the musical mix, but the weeping effects at the end of the piece suggest that the composer primarily wanted to depict a doll made of china. Either way, it's a beguiling piece of music.

In his workshop

As you might expect, in "The Penny-Whistle Song," Anderson uses the flutes to suggest the the humble tin whistle, also called the "penny whistle" because that's what one cost in the 19th century. The work is an example of the composer penchant for nostalgia.

"Fiddle-Faddle," based on "Three Blind Mice," is one of the composer's most popular works. It features the violins, of course, again making use of pizzicato effects. Anderson's arrangement has some big-band overtones, with the brass and strings facing off against one another. Fiedler and the Boston Pops premiered the work in 1947.

The composer's music of this period is consistent in its high quality, clever construction and melodic memorability. Critic Richard Ginell has written, "Leroy Anderson is one of the great bridges of American music, a musician who tore down the wall between the so-called 'serious' music and so-called 'popular' music. He introduced millions of people to the sounds a symphony orchestra can make painlessly, with consummate taste and an ear for whimsy."

In Part 2 of this series, we'll cover his first Christmas recordings and such well-remembered items as "The Typewriter" and "Bugler's Holiday."

LINK to Part 1