Venetian Carnival

Some musical items, like Sailing By and the “Mantovani sound,” are so much part of the scenery that we tend to take them for granted without asking where they came from. Sailing by, used for years at close-down on BBC Radio 4, is in fact the creation one of the most successful of all British composers of light music, Ronald Binge. His Elizabethan Serenade is scarcely less well known and he was responsible too for a whole variety of radio and TV signature tunes that were familiar in their day. It was also Ronald Binge who devised the innovation in scoring, best described as “cascading strings,” that was inseparably associated at one time with Mantovani and his orchestra, above all in a piece called Charmaine.

The witty little Venetian Carnival is based on a Venetian popular song - called “O mamma, mamma cara” but also known as Carnival of Venice - which has been used as a subject for variation by generations of composers, beginning perhaps with Paganini in 1829. Far from competing with his predecessors, Binge adroitly avoids the danger of taking himself too seriously and presents a kaleidoscope of tiny variations in a resourceful diversity of shapes and colours.