The Music of Henry Mancini Naxos 8.557825
- Composer: Henry Mancini
- Conductor: Richard Hayman
- Orchestra: Richard Hayman Orchestra
Among light music fans and film-buffs the now familiar handful of popular tunes and ‘standards’ left by composer, song-writer, arranger pianist and conductor Henry Mancini are tinged with the halo of nostalgia. The recipient of twenty Grammies, four Oscars, eighteen Oscar nominations and various other ‘lifetime’ awards, Enrico (‘Henry’) Nicola Mancini was born in Cleveland, Ohio on 16th April 1924, and grew up in West Aquilippa, Philadelphia. A proficient multi-instrumentalist, from an early age he was an adept pianist and also took up the flute (the latter courtesy of his steelworker father, a music-lover who was himself an amateur piccolo-player in the Aqilippa, Philadelphia based Sons of Italy Band). During his early training at the Carnegie Institute Music School in Pittsburgh, Henry was also steadily drawn towards jazz and big band and developed a keen interest in arranging. In 1942 he entered the New York Juilliard Graduate School but by 1943 was drafted into the US Air Force, where he remained until 1946, primarily in the capacity of military band musician.
The Music of Henry Mancini Review
Since the 1960s, Henry Mancini's most popular film and television music has been regularly available on LPs and CDs, most notably from RCA. Indeed, the popular themes from Peter Gunn, The Pink Panther, and The Days of Wine and Roses, as well as the song “Moon River” from Breakfast at Tiffany's and the instrumental Baby Elephant Walk from Hatari, are essential items on all of Mancini's greatest-hits collections, just as they are on this Naxos disc by Richard Hayman and his Symphony Orchestra. Apart from these classics, though, secondary selections can vary as widely as Mancini's prolific output did, both in his own copious compilations and in Hayman's broad but shallow survey. With less familiar diversions taking up valuable space, such as Dream of a Lifetime or Ballerina's Dream, and non-essential filler such as The Great Race March, Pie in the Face Polka, Drummer's Delight, and March with Mancini, Hayman's collection seems skimpy and scattered, especially when compared with any of Mancini's more generous and substantial albums. Though it amounts to a retrospective, it conveys little sense of what makes this music worth playing and gives undue attention to some trifles. As a pro in the easy listening field, Hayman surely means to appeal to a general audience, not necessarily to satisfy collectors, who would do well to stick with the original recordings anyway. In terms of the performances, Hayman and his ensemble bring an energetic pops concert feeling to the best-known selections and try to make the weaker offerings at least amusing or touching, though with indifferent results. These musicians are competing with memorable recordings that make unflattering comparisons inevitable, and their slick but uninspired album comes off as inferior in a match-up with RCA's 1993 Best of Mancini, or the 2000 compendium Henry Mancini's Greatest Hits, either of which is preferable for the exciting and colorful performances under the composer's direction. Originally recorded in 1990 and reissued in 2006, this disc has good reproduction and depth, though the Concert Hall of the Slovak Radio, Bratislava, lends this music a bit too much resonance. Blair Sanderson – AllMusic.com