“For music lovers during this challenging time, Bach, as always, can console us and Beethoven can inspire resolve. But Leroy Anderson’s charming, deceptively simple music will make you feel better about things,” writes Anthony Tommasini in Thursday’s (4/23) New York Times. “Anderson, who died in 1975, was the unrivaled master of the light orchestral miniature…. ‘The Syncopated Clock’ … is a two-and-a-half-minute masterpiece…. As the strings play a genial, ambling theme, a percussion instrument mimics a clock’s ticktocks as the seconds pass…. But this is clearly an American clock in the era of the big bands and jazz. [In the] coda … the clock can’t help letting loose with a spurt of wild syncopations…. ‘The Typewriter’ … also speaks to the confined moment we’re in now, spending hours a day typing at our keyboards…. In ‘The Waltzing Cat,’ Anderson takes a poke at Strauss—and, more broadly, at the whole style of 19th-century European waltzes that indulge in melodic gestures where strings slide up and down with schmaltzy glissandos…. Yet Anderson’s parody is good-natured, a bit of wholesome American ribbing. What comes through is that he is actually fond of those sugary Viennese waltzes.”
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