2016 photograph of Leonard Slatkin (photograph by KokotheDog, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)
Between April of 2006 and September of 2007, American conductor Leonard Slatkin engaged in a series of sessions with the BBC Concert Orchestra to record the “complete” works of Leroy Anderson for the Naxos American Classics series. About a month ago, the entire collection was released as a box set of five CDs. Since Christmas was one of Anderson’s favored topics (my high school band played his “A Christmas Festival” to death every December), there is at least some justification in justifying this collection getting wrapped with a bow and placed beneath a holiday tree.
Almost all of Anderson’s compositions fall into the category of “light music.” Each piece would fit comfortably on one side of a 45 RPM disc; and, during the Fifties, it would be almost impossible to find a juke box that did not include at least one Anderson disc. His music was also a favorite with audiences of the Boston Pops Orchestra when it was led by Arthur Fielder; and Fielder was responsible for world premiere performances (if that phrase is appropriate) of many Anderson compositions. By the end of the twentieth century, however, most of the Anderson catalog had lapsed into oblivion and would probably have stayed there had Mark Morris not created “Sandpaper Ballet” for the San Francisco Ballet (SFB), which was first performed in the War Memorial Opera House on April 27, 1999.
I have dropped enough clues about my age on this site that regular readers can probably guess that I was exposed to a fair amount of Anderson’s music. Indeed, when I worked as a classical music announcer at WTBS (back when those were the call letters of the campus radio station of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), one of our most brilliant technicians like to boast about his “Holy Trinity” of composers: Johann Sebastian Bach, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Leroy Anderson. I never had any reason to doubt that he was enthusiastic about all three of them in equal measure.
Some readers may also recall that, this past February, the second program in SFB’s Digital Season included a video of “Sandpaper Ballet” captured at the Opera House on February 16, 2020. While I was not particularly impressed with the choreography, there were quite a few twinges of nostalgia as I listened to Anderson’s music. Listening to the entire content of the Naxos box set revived those twinges more often than not. There were also a few belly laughs, the strongest coming from the loopy sound effects that Anderson summoned for his arrangement of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.”
Mind you, I am not recommending that listeners try to consume the entirety of this collection in a single sitting. Nevertheless, I came away more than a little impressed with the breadth of Anderson’s diversity. Yes, much of his rhetoric sounds as if it had been cultivated in a corn field; and his “juke box popularity” suggests that many preferred his offerings as background music. Nevertheless, more often than not, Slatkin’s interpretations tend to prompt the attentive listener to sit up and take notice.
As an afterthought it may be worth remembering that Slatkin’s father was Felix Slatkin, a major figure in Hollywood during the Fifties. He conducted both his own Concert Arts Orchestra and the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra. While his repertoire included “serious” compositions (such as Arnold Schoenberg’s “Verklärte Nacht”), it is hard to imagine that his “pops” activities did not include a generous share of Anderson’s music. Slatkin-the-son planned his recording sessions with the BBC Concert Orchestra to honor the centennial of Anderson’s birth on June 29, 1908; but his interest in Anderson probably came from listening to performances by his father.
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