Ernest Tomlinson has long held an honoured place as the doyen of English-born composers of light orchestral music. His place in this increasingly tempting Marco Polo British Light Music series would thus be assured, even if it were not for the fact that the huge library of Light Orchestral Music he has built up at his home in Lancashire has been an important source of material for the series.
This collection begins with the Little Serenade, his one internationally familiar composition. It began life in a 1955 radio play, The Story of Cinderella whose success enabled Tomlinson to become a full-time freelance composer. Two other excerpts from that score prove scarcely less delightful—the jaunty ''Stage Coach'' and swirling ''Cinderella Waltz''. It seems a pity that these three pieces of common origin should be separated in this collection by the clever, but rather brash, An English Overture, originally written for brass band.
The other attractions including the charming Sweet and Dainty, which began life as an advert for Palmolive soap and is in much the same style as the Little Serenade. Much of the rest of the programme, though, doesn't seem to me to match up to quite the same level of invention. Perhaps Tomlinson's most familiar music after the Little Serenade is his Suite of English Folk-Dances, which was included in a 1970 EMI collection conducted by Sir Vivian Dunn. Here we are offered Tomlinson's Second Suite of English Folk-Dances, which is no less cleverly put together, but without the same level of invention that marks out the best light music and which made the Marco Polo Haydn Wood collection in this series such a delight.
As with that Wood issue (8/92), I find it nothing short of amazing that a Slovak orchestra can sound so much at home in what we would always think of as a specifically British province. Tomlinson enthusiasts should be delighted with the result, though others may wish to sample first.'