Larry Adler’s career has spanned all possible musical horizons. He is not only the world’s finest harmonica player, but a musician who has that very special gift of being able to ‘magic’ any melody and make it sound entirely his own. The present collection is issued to celebrate his 85th birthday, and the only occasion during a long and productive musical life which Decca’s accompanying publicity eulogy fails to mention, is when that relative youngster – our own EG – recently held a party to celebrate his own three-score-years-and-ten, Larry turned up especially to play a very touching ‘Happy birthday’ tribute.
Adler hasn’t lost his touch. The delicious Genevieve Waltz (which he wrote for a much-loved British movie aeons ago) still sparkles and glitters, and in Hora Staccato he almost out-Heifetz’s Heifetz: what a vibrant tone he commands here. He even plays Gershwin’s Rhapsody accompanied by Gershwin himself on a piano roll (‘The goddam thing sounds as if I wrote it for you’ was the composer’s comment at the time). How ravishingly gentle he is in Dvorak’s lovely and universal cor anglais melody from the New World Symphony; and ‘Summertime’, which ends the programme, is haunting. Douglas Gamley did the arrangements and conducts the orchestra; a pity they did not give him a larger body of strings. However, he accompanies Larry with great sophistication.'