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Magic
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Mantovani
"The Magic Of Mantovani; Mantovani's Golden Hits"
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RECORD ONE
The Magic of MANTOVANI
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MANTOVANI'S
GOLDEN HITS
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Annunzio Paolo Mantovani, a violinist who is the
son of a violinist, always wanted to lead an orchestra
with a lot of strings. And when a recording company.
offered him just such an orchestra in 1951, he determined to give his strings such a distinctive sound that they would be immediately recognizable. How well he succeeded in doing that can be seen in the fact that, after almost a quarter of a century and innumerable attempts by others to capture the elusive Mantovani quality, there is still only one "Mantovani sound." More than a million copies of his albums are bought every year. And his annual, three-month American tours covering 60 cities, which he began in 1956, have sold an unprecedented number of tickets for a concert attraction.
Born in Italy, but brought to England when he was four, Mantovani ("Monty," to his English friends) began playing professionally when he was sixteen and two years later began leading his own groups which have ranged from quartets and restaurant orchestras to the 45-piece concert ensemble (including 32 strings) with which he records and tours.
The secret of his continued success, he says, is that he is "a string man." "I know what I want from string players," he explains. "I know the capabilities of the violin. I know what it can do.
"And," he adds with a knowing smile. "I've got first class lads playing for me.
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SIDE ONE
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Charmaine
Rapée-Pollack
This was the record that changed Mantovani from a
successful English conductor into an international phenomenon. In 1951, when the American branch of Mantovani's English recording firm asked him to record an album of waltzes, he decided use a big string section.
"I wanted to get a classic string sound, to use close
of sound, harmonies, to get an effect of an overlapping as though we were in a cathedral," he later explained.
The Mantovani string sound was born in this album.
One of the album's waltzes, "Charmaine," caught the ear of a Cleveland disc jockey, Bill Randle, who plugged the song, making it — and Mantovani — a tremendous hit.
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Greensleeves
Traditional-Arranged by Binge
This old familiar ballad dates back at least to the 16th century. Mantovani's fondness for it is reflected in the fact that he named his country home in Bournemouth "Greensleeves." This arrangement, originally recorded in 1953 but since re-recorded, is by Ronald Binge, a composer and arranger who worked with Mantovani in creating the inimitable Mantovani sound
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Diane
Rapée
A logical follow-up to the ground-breaking success of Mantovani's "Charmaine" was "Diane." "Charmaine," written by Erno Rapée and Lew Pollack, had been the springboard for Mantovani's fame and had launched the fad for motion-picture theme songs in the late Twenties. The song was not heard in the film itself (What Price Glory, a silent picture), but used to advertise it.
The following year, Rapée wrote "Diane," which was
part of the soundtrack of Seventh Heaven, starring
Charles Farrell and Janet Gaynor, who won the
Academy Award for her performance.
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Swedish Rhapsody
Alfven
This bright, merry tune, which Mantovani fills with
orchestra bells, a gay accordion and bubbling flute and clarinet, is taken from music by Hugo Alfven which was based on Swedish folk material. Mantovani's version shows how easily he can switch from his familiar string sounds to an almost boisterous use of woodwinds and brass without really getting out of character.
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Around the World
Young
Still another variation of Mantovani's use of strings is
developed in this arrangement of Victor Young's theme for the 1956 film Around the World in 80 Days. Opening with a high, singing trumpet solo, Mantovani features the trumpet all the way through, cushioning it on his strings in the second chorus.
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Main Theme from "Exodus"
Gold
Ernest Gold's score for Otto Preminger's film Exodus
was one of the commanding musical achievements for films in 1960. To write the score, Gold, a Hollywood composer, spent months in Israel getting the feeling of the country, the people and their music. This prize-winning theme was adapted from several traditional Hebrew tunes, blended and developed by Gold to catch the underlying feeling of Israel. Mantovani underscores that feeling by the way in which he builds from a gentle, almost wistful beginning to the staunch, forceful statement of the end.
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SIDE TWO
Something To Remember You By
Dietz-Schwartz
There are — or can be — three aspects of "Something To
Remember You By." It can be romantic, as Mantovani
plays it. It can be torchy, as Libby Holman sang it in
Three's a Crowd, a 1930 revue. Or it can be comedy,
which is the way Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz
intended i to be when they wrote it and the
way Rudy Vallee wound up singing it in 1931. The original "crooner" was trying to sing it in a romantic-torchy way in a Boston theater when a grapefruit came sailing
out of the balcony at him, landing on the drummer's
cymbal. The incident made front pages across the country, and Vallee kept the publicity going for months by singing the song with a wastebasket over his head.
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Love Makes the World Go 'Round (La Ronde)
Straus-Cochran-Ducreaux
The heritage and almost the name of the great waltz-composing Strausses of Vienna was carried on by Oscar Straus, born in Vienna in 1870. He is known best for his operetta The Chocolate Soldier and, in the waltzing tradition, "A Waltz Dream." "Love Makes the World Go 'Round" is a Straus waltz composed for a French film, La Ronde, known originally as Merry-Go-Round, a title Mantovani acknowledges with the merry-go-round music style that turns up in the middle of this arrangement. The melody became known as "Love Makes the World Go 'Round " when English lyrics were written
for it by Dorcas Cochran.
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Unchained Melody
North
Of all the younger American composers who were writing
"serious" music just after World War II, Alex North
was one of the most promising. In a field in which
newcomers are rarely well-known, his name was already
familiar and, partly because of that, he was called to
Hollywood to write the score for the film version of
A Streetcar Named Desire. It was a score that made
striking use of jazz, blues and other idiomatic American
music, a score set so brilliantly apart from most film
scores of the day that North was kept on to write scores
for another Tennessee Williams film, The Rose Tatoo,
Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, Carson McCuller's
Member of the Wedding, as well as such sheer Hollywoodiana as Cleopatra, The Agony and the Ecstasy and
Viva Zapata! These scores served their purposes well
but none of them produced a melody that caught the public fancy until he composed a title tune for a film called Unchained in 1955.
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Fascination
Marchetti
This is a valse tzigane — a gypsy waltz — and Mantovani puts it immediately into character with a solo violin coaxing out the melody in gypsy style. It was composed relatively recently in 1904 by F. D. Marchetti but remained a esoteric part of the light classical repertoire until 1957 when it was used as a recurring theme in a film called Love in the Afternoon which starred Gary Cooper, Audrey Hepburn and Maurice Chevalier. It became a hit then, not because of the film, but because of a record by Jane Morgan, an American who had made a name as a singer in Paris and found in this old romantic waltz a song with which she could transfer her continental flair to her native country.
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This Nearly Was Mine
Rodgers-Hammerstein
Richard Rodgers wrote only two songs for the mature French planter, Emile de Becque, in South Pacific — "Some Enchanted Evening" and "This Nearly Was
Mine." But with only these two songs, Ezio Pinza, the
great operatic basso making his first appearance in the Broadway musical theater, became the matinee idol of 1949. Rodgers wrote both songs as explanations of
de Becque's character-"romantic, rather powerful, but
not too involved," as he explained. And this was the
way that Pinza sang them. But Mantovani sees "This
Nearly Was Mine" as a gentle, almost wistful song and the attitude is set in the very opening passages by the woodwinds.
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The Blue Danube
Strauss-Arranged by Mantovani
After Mantovani had his first great success in 1951 with "Charmaine," a single taken from an album of waltzes, it was inevitable that there should be, as a follow-up, another album of waltzes. So, in 1952, he put together a second-this time a collection by one of his favorite composers, Johann Strauss, the younger. Naturally, the album included the most famous of all the Strauss waltzes, possibly the most famous waltz ever written: "The Blue Danube." ...
(album notes)
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Annunzio Paolo Mantovani (Italian: [anˈnuntsjo ˈpaːolo mantoˈvaːni]; 15 November 1905 – 30 March 1980) was an Italian British conductor, composer and light orchestra–styled entertainer with a cascading strings musical signature.
The book British Hit Singles & Albums stated that Mantovani was "Britain's most successful album act before the Beatles ... the first act to sell over one million stereo albums and [have] six albums simultaneously in the US Top 30 in 1959".
Mantovani was born on 15 November 1905 in Venice, Italy, into a musical family. ... -- Wikipedia
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Great Instrumental Music
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