Swiss label Guild has issued an extensive, sorely needed, and nicely executed series of albums covering the genre known as light music in Britain and easy listening in North America, with attention to ensembles from both places and occasionally from other countries as well. This is a genre well known to anybody who has ever entered a thrift shop, but intelligent reissues of
Percy Faith,
Mantovani, and their lesser-kown contemporaries have been exceedingly rare. There are gems scattered through this entire collection of what might be called little symphonies for adults, most of them confined to the dimensions of a 78 or 45 rpm record, perhaps covering both sides in special situations. Most of the discs in the series are organized thematically, either focusing on specific regional styles or influences (American orchestras, or pieces with Spanish or Italian flavors for example) or taking up specific episodes in the music's history (such as Britain's Music While You Work programs). This "Musical Kaleidoscope" is something of a grab bag of works that do not fit into any of the classifications for the other discs issued thus far. That might seem to make it a good choice for those new to the series, but part of the interest of the music lies it its range of responses to a highly conventionalized language -- given that every orchestra probably did a piece about Rome at one time or another, for example, part of the fun is in seeing how those pieces turned out differently even though the composers and arrangers had only small canvases on which to work. Many of the pieces on the first part of this disc are little bits of comedy, although the opening Kaleidoscope of the
New Century Orchestra is more substantial. An added attraction here is the sampling at the end of the disc of the various regional orchestras maintained by the BBC, all of which delved into light music more often than the main
BBC Symphony Orchestra. Those who have been following Guild's series will welcome this disc, but for the casual buyer, the disc called Amor Amor might be a better first choice.