The Oasis reunion may be rocking us back to the Nineties, but last night’s BBC Prom celebrated Britpop’s frivolous flipside, the easy-listening boom. The music was created in the Fifties and Sixties, but this concert probably wouldn’t have happened if the genre hadn’t been revived with a raised eyebrow 30 years ago.
The host Mel Giedroyc tried to evoke the ironic ultra-lounge ambience by sipping a pineapple cocktail, but at this remove it was possible to view this music with more respect. Seeing the BBC Concert Orchestra tackle these tunes under the ebullient baton of Edwin Outwater, it became obvious how sophisticated they are.
In part, this was a celebration of Henry Mancini, whose centenary falls this year. The vivid performances of his film music here showed how he used traditional, modern and foreign styles like the colours in an artist’s palette.
His crime themes Charade and Peter Gunn incorporated Latin and rock’n’roll respectively to create an air of menace. For the underscores Party Poop and Hong Kong Fireworks he drew on the older tradition of light music, using the orchestra to paint whimsical pictures in sound.
Days of Wine and Roses reminded us of how he extended the life of the Great American Songbook; in a nod to its status as a jazz standard, it was given a mid-tempo swing, lush vocals by a terrific backing quartet and natty trumpet and piano solos.
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Exotica and Latin fared best in this orchestral setting and there was plenty of it, all played superbly with the percussion section especially excelling themselves. Quincy Jones’s irresistible Soul Bossa Nova was the highlight — just to hear it blasting out all over the Albert Hall had you chuckling along with the cuica.
Two variations on Nicholas Roubanis’s Misirlou were cunningly spliced together: the humid Martin Denny version and Dick Dale’s rock guitar dervish. Again, Mancini nailed the mood of mystery with the sprightly samba Rain Drops in Rio and the sultry Slow Hot Wind, both assisted by the early September mugginess outside.
Not all of this music has worn well. Moon River sounds a bit wet these days, even when sung by Mancini’s daughter, Monica, who described it as the composer’s “crown jewel” (a reference to royalties perhaps).
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The lyrics to Music to Watch Girls By, sung thrustingly by an open-necked Oliver Tompsett, would get him arrested if he enacted them on the Tube journey home. Surprisingly, Alfie and This Girl’s in Love With You also lacked sparkle, smoothly sung as they were by the Dionne Warwick dead ringer Rachel John.
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If those Bacharach ballads only took us half a world away, the space-age pop of Les Baxter and Juan García Esquivel blasted us into the stratosphere. Again, the band was in its element with the light-music-meets-Latin of these propulsive pieces and it was a joy to watch them reveal how tricky the arrangements are while making it all look easy.
The swooping strings of Baxter’s Shooting Star evoked a supermarket in space, his Saturday Night on Saturn was a whirlwind trip in a caffeinated capsule and Esquivel’s Watchamacallit leant into the silliness of early synthesizers. An encore of Laurie Johnson’s Animal Magic theme confirmed it: in a cocktail bar or a concert hall, these tunes are classics.
★★★★☆
Available on BBC Sounds
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