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University Centre Auditorium
February 14, 2015
What is palm court music? Think back to the glamorous decades before the Second World War: a band playing in a pavilion on the Promenade in Folkestone, or in the gardens of the Grand Hôtel in Nice, or in the tearoom of our own Empress Hotel. You are listening to the music with one ear, or maybe both ears when the tune brings back particularly pleasant memories. If classical music is a complex Malbec and pop is Coca-Cola, then palm court music is Liebfraumilch - sweet, but not toxic enough to send you reeling into the parking lot afterwards.
Charles Job, the founder and conductor of the 20-strong Palm Court Light Orchestra, pointed out that his orchestra is bigger than the traditional palm court band and smaller than a symphony orchestra - a fact which clearly opens up new possibilities in the chosen genre. The sixteen intermezzi, waltzes, marches, serenades and extracts from operas and film music contained in the special Valentine Diva program certainly came across with far more brilliance and energy than a handful of palm court musicians could ever have mustered.
The program alternated between vocal and purely instrumental music. Canadian soprano Lambroula Pappas stole a big part of the evening with her amazing coloratura and dynamic range, including high notes delivered with a volume and spectral purity sufficient to shatter crystal glasses. During the first half of the concert she appeared with her hair tied back and dressed in a formal black suit, as appropriate to Bach/Gounod's "Ave Maria", Handel's "Lascia ch'io pianga" and Puccini's "Doretta's Aria". However, during the intermission she let her hair down and changed into a less formal bare-shouldered burgundy dress to match the more laid-back songs that followed. Even her body language changed from rigid to expressive.
Sensitized as we are nowadays to political correctness, one might have been forgiven for doing a double-take when Pappas repeated the words "Zigeuner" and "Gypsy" with great gusto in the song taken from Noel Coward's operetta "Bitter Sweet". This ethnic label is controversial in both present-day German and English, but at least we haven't yet become so mentally ossified as to censor such musically important songs from the modern repertoire.
The audience was a veritable ocean of grey hair, with many billowing sails in the shape of red garments to celebrate Valentine's Day. Everybody laughed politely at Charles Job's nudge-nudge jokes in between the moments musicaux. The encore consisted of an arrangement of Boulanger's "Da Capo", this time to great acclaim. Clearly the Palm Court Light Orchestra enjoys huge popularity among the generations that still remember the elegant pleasures of taking afternoon tea with musical accompaniment. Inevitably their numbers will diminish over time, and one can only hope that the Orchestra will win new followers by adapting its offerings accordingly.
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