Box of Delights, British Light Music Gems

"Tate wrote the London Fields suite for the BBC Light Music Festival of 1958. There's a flight of the bumble-bee hell-for-leather romp, xylophone to the fore, in the Maze at Hampton Court. Armstrong Gibbs' Fancy Dress suite is in four movements of which Dusk became phenomenally successful - a delectably emotional slow Delian waltz. This is a fascinating collection which offers some surprising and always engaging perspectives on British Light Music." Rob Barnett, musicweb-international.com 

"Amidst the excited flurry of the monthly Top Gun Lyrita releases comes this gentler morsel. But just because it’s not Boult’s Elgar Symphonies or the Coleridge-Taylor Violin Concerto or the George Lloyds or … well, whatever else it’s not, that doesn’t mean you should pass by. Here we have a quintet of composers and plenty of relaxed enjoyment. It also qualifies as a Light Music offering, as the disc’s subtitle makes clear, and given the prodigious number of genre releases recently that’s no bad thing either.
 
Nothing over-serious here – just charming fare all round, finely played and conducted. Try Leaper for another take on Bantock but otherwise banish humdrum days with this delightful collection." Jonathan Woolf, MusicWeb International