Does this bring back memories?

[Uncle Al]

Summers come & go but there will always be

A Summer Place (1960)

Uncle Al

[Stevie D]

I remember this well from my childhood in the 1950s.
Here's another one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKhrRgadxhc

Great orchestration from Percy Faith and really nice, tight playing. But what strikes home on both videos is that it was a completely male preserve. There are no women in the orchestra, not a single one. Sadly, I think that was fairly typical of many professional orchestras and bands of that time. You might get a lady harpist on occasions but that was it.

[Kirbstone]

Yes indeed and Stevie's comment is appropriate. That may have been more the case in the US, where there is a far greater pool of musicians from which an orchestra can be assembled.
Here, with a small population all orchestras had to draw on women players & performers to arrive at the numbers required for an orchestra, so to my eyes it looks strange.

Pleasant radio memories, yes, but that sort of repertoire has long since been grabbed by the musak industry for background infill....e.g. Montovani, et Al.

Tom

[pelmut]

Good light music has not been entirely forgotten and the ladies have redressed the balance: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_ ... +orchestra ...although even these concerts have now been discontinued.

[Gordon]

Oh yes. I love that music. Brings back lots of happy memories.

[beachlion]

It certainly brings back memories. But this type of music was much too polished to my taste. I think it was meant to be liked by the general public, as an anti Rock and Roll escape.
I was already in the more jazzy music, from New Orleans to the big bands of the 40s and 50s. But with this type of music, I liked Mantovani and Mancini slightly better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zzFbSN ... dhertzberg
I used the violins of the Mantovani recordings to test turntables and amplifiers.
But the mucical arrangements are all very good.

[Sinned]

Oh the hairstyles, the dark suits and that drummer - Keith Moon or Karl Palmer he ain't. But yeah, I remember the music and somehow it seems like a really naive era. I was 6 years old at that time.

[SkirtsDad]

It certainly brings back memories. But this type of music was much too polished to my taste. I think it was meant to be liked by the general public, as an anti Rock and Roll escape.
I was already in the more jazzy music, from New Orleans to the big bands of the 40s and 50s. But with this type of music, I liked Mantovani and Mancini slightly better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zzFbSN ... dhertzberg
I used the violins of the Mantovani recordings to test turntables and amplifiers.
But the mucical arrangements are all very good.

I think I had even more of an eclectic mix of music in the three or four records that I owned in my youth than in the 10s of CDs I have today. Those first ones included Jim Reeves, Sea Shanties and Mantovani followed by Western Movie Themes.

You picked a favourite of mine "O Mio Babbino Caro". I love to hear it sung by Maria Callas, for instance. A couple of years ago I came across a version by an amazing Dutch girl on Holland's Got Talent... I think the intro is interesting to watch, but if you want to skip it then it starts at 1:50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDqTBlKU4CE

[Gregg1100]

All the old stuff for me. As 14 year old entering the 60's, I have to say that was the best music ever---until the very early 70's, when it seemed to go tits up ( for me).
I like Carmen Monarcha's version of O Mia Babbino Caro- from Andre Rieus Strauss Orchestra. Classics made popular. Carla Maffioletti's voice had a range that could nearly break glass, lol.
Also like James Last, Bert Kaempfert, Henry Mancini and Mantovani. Not into rap or jazz in any form- mutilated music, lol.
I also like songs by Maria and Margot Hellwig, Heike Schafer and Helene Fischer- a different language, but the words and music are really nice.

[beachlion]

....... You picked a favourite of mine "O Mio Babbino Caro". I love to hear it sung by Maria Callas, for instance. .....

The Maria Callas version gives me goosebumps every time I hear it.

Where are the composers from 100-150 years ago?

[skirted_in_SF]

Where are the composers from 100-150 years ago?

Dead.

[melsav]

I was a kid when "A summer place " was released, I remember when I went to the cinema for the Saturday morning kids movies that was always playing.

[crfriend]

Well, 1960 cannot bring memories back for me as I was not alive then. However, within several 10ths of a second I recognised the piece immediately as one I'd heard a lot during childhood. But, then again, I was always a bit of the odd one in my musical tastes as evidenced by the fact that when everybody else my age was listening to the Beatles I preferred the likes of Vivaldi, Bach, and Telemann.

Nowadays, I still go for "the classics" and orchestral music, but I have also developed a taste for the sequencer-driven sound of modern "techno" (dance music, really) and its forebears because it has a rigid structure that helps me focus my brain when I'm working on tough knotty problems that can resist solution. The three-minute "pop" piece tends to leave me cold as three minutes isn't really long enough to properly develop a theme, and then do interesting things with it (although I do have a strong affinity for much of John Williams' film music -- anybody who can write a piece called Scherzo for Motorcycle and Orchestra has a gift).

[skirtedbrit]

Thanks guys for this lovely thread, Here is my pennyworth.
My main interest has always been orchestral followed by Prog Rock as they develop like a story develops. However, some groups like Queen and Fleetwood Mac do fire me up.
How about 2 other pop pieces that were one hit wonders in their day; Eye Level by the Simon Park orchestra and A Walk in the Black Forest by Horst Jankovsky?
In the early sixties my grandfather befriended an Italian couple who had been stranded in our local port of Barrow-in-Furness (probably by their ship being unseaworthy). They were from Naples, he was a chef and was proud of cooking for the British Tommy when he was a prisoner of war!
She was from a farm on the slopes of Vesuvius which had been overun by lava in the 1944 eruption and she had a lovely singing voice which we recorded on a quality reel to reel recorder. She sang a mixture of light classical and popular and as I remember it she could have had a professional career. At the time we lived in great rural poverty made worse by our father spending what little we had on expensive things like cameras and audio. But, this inspired my love of music and photography.
Our part of the country was very insular and this was the first time I had been exposed to people outside my culture and I found this liberating and inspirational.
Classical music has always not just inspired but transported me. For instance the Rachmaninov 2nd Piano Concerto was originally an outpouring of the composers emotions but I see it very differently as the seas around the Hebrides in all their moods.
If you know this piece imagine the opening as a stormy sea but with strong sunlight flourescing the green sea with a black backdrop of the Skye Cuillins and after the first few bars deepen a brightly coloured fishing leaps into sight from the waves.
No, I wrote this sober and not a magic mushroom in sight!

[Kirbstone]

I spar with Rachmaninov almost daily on my pianoforte. I'm totally gobsmacked by the depth and power of his 2nd piano concerto and I would find it easy to picture Skye & the Cuillins while listening to it.
However, as a piece evocative of that region Mendlessohn's Hebridean overture takes some beating. On a flat calm day in the early 80s we anchored off Staffa and rowed the dinghy right into Fingal's Cave. Right then a group of youths clambered over the rock columns carrying a 'ghetto blaster' and promptly put the relevant track from that great work on, so I have had the pleasure of hearing it played in the cave itself!!

Tom