English suites and others no. 24

Say, remember our Celtic musical tour? Across the sea now to Ireland. Our tourist guide to Irish folk tunes is Leroy Anderson - an American of Swedish descent, not Irish at all - who was the staff composer for the Boston Pops for many years. Many of the brief pieces he wrote them became embedded in American popular culture, such as "Sleigh Ride," which with lyrics added became a Christmas carol. Anderson also had a knack for music about mechanical objects, such as one called "The Syncopated Clock" or his concerto for typewriter and orchestra. (Jerry Lewis had a routine in which he would mime to this piece and lose track of his place, but I'll spare you a link to that.)

So here Anderson applies his quite impressive Harvard-trained skills at orchestration and arrangement to a set of what passed in 1940s American ears as typical Irish melodies: a mixture of ballads of the kind that used to be sung by John McCormack with some equally hoary dance tunes, all played by the Boston Pops under its venerable conductor, Arthur Fiedler.

For this Irish Suite, we've got The Irish Washerwoman (0.00), The Minstrel Boy (2.56), The Rakes of Mallow (7.24), The Wearing of the Green (10.42), The Last Rose of Summer (14.07), and The Girl I Left Behind Me (18.05). Applause separates each movement - this is a Pops concert, after all - so you can tell where you are even if you don't know the tunes, though I expect you will.

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