Ladies Only Cafe Strings: Angel Eyes

Regular: £11.49

Sale: £11.49
Regular

Out of Stock

Unit Price: per

Cat No: 8557177

Release Date: 08 January 2003

Label: Naxos - Nxc / Naxos Classics

Packaging Type: Jewel Case

No of Units: 1

Barcode: 747313217724

Genres: Classical

Composer/Series: Ladies Only Cafe Strings

Description
Angel EyesLadies Only Cafe StringsIn the earliest decades of the twentieth century whenrecording was in its infancy, before dance music and jazz were commonplace andwhen cinema was silent and radio was new, but as yet untried as a commercialmedium, the recording companies found a most profitable growth area in what wehave since broadly labelled 'salon', or more specifically 'Palm Court'. Theubiquitous background music of select nightspots, restaurants and hotellounges, at such plush venues it was played to entertain the Edwardian equivalentof 21st-century 'couch potatoes', but in contrast to 'elevator music' and othermodern equivalents it was live, not canned. A long-lost night world ofaccordions and plangent violins, its daytime backup was a boom industry thatkept both writers and players busy. Directly mirroring public taste it alsoprovided popular ensembles with regular work in recording studios where outputwas as prolific as it was diversified. Salon music's early key figures were mostly violinists ofEuropean origin, moustachioed men with exotic, foreign-sounding names like HerrIff and De Groot, who apart from the latest lancers and schottisches andcake-walks purveyed staples of the 'genre music' repertoire. With Mendelssohn'sSpring Song, Rubinstein's Melody in F and pieces by Grieg, Raff or Moszkowskito the fore, they specialised in such tuneful trifles as Toselli's Serenata,Thome's Simple aveu, Silesu's Un peu d'amour and, as bosom companions to thegypsy airs (always sure sellers), tunes inspired by monastery gardens andsleepy lagoons, scores of violin-preponderant, now long-neglected miniatureswith schmaltzy titles like Quand l'amour meurt or Parfum du passe. By the end of the first World War the waltz had given way tojazzy American imports and within a few years the trend for hotter tempi openeda new avenue for the more adventurous groups, notably Dajos Bela, Mar˘ekWeber and Edith Lorand, who delved avidly into areas alien to pure salon (thatis, into the latest jazz-flavoured fox-trots and quicksteps) and in doing sounwittingly laid the foundations of 'crossover'. From the late 1920s onwardsthemes from classical landmarks were 'jazzed up' by small dance orchestras andbig bands alike and, in a later juxtaposition well graphed on recordings, thelast century's final decades brought a cloaking of jazz in a classical idiom,'playing Bach jazz' like Jacques Loussier or jazz on a Strad ?á la Menuhin,which despite its short-lived niche-market limitations, took the crossoverstyle through a new phase of its evolution.The vast genre music back-catalogue is not just a legacy butalso a reminder that short, light classics, even 'low-brow' compositionselevated, have always been popular and commercially viable. The formula isproven and the advantage of hindsight and a tradition spanning more than acentury is that it is now possible for Ladies Only, a seven-piece 'classical'chamber ensemble of Swedish Chamber Orchestra players and their arrangers, top
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