Grand Hotel Light Music – Tom Jenkins

Some names survive because the music is great. Others survive, more quietly, because someone knew exactly how to play the not-so-great with conviction. Tom Jenkins belonged to the second category, though he had the training to have gone another way entirely.

He studied with Carl Flesch, remember. That is not a small thing. Flesch’s studio in Berlin and later London turned out virtuosi who went on to concert careers of real substance, and Jenkins had the fingers and the ear to have been among them. Instead he found himself, in 1948, inheriting the “Grand Hotel” broadcast slot from Albert Sandler, who was dying, and building a career as the supreme exponent of what the English so charmingly (and a little condescendingly) call light music. He died in 1957, forty-seven years old, worn down by the same relentless broadcasting schedule that had killed Sandler. Two violinists effectively martyred to teatime radio.

This 1951 studio material, gathered onto Dinmore’s disc, catches him at the height of his authority in the idiom, and the Strad — if that’s indeed what he’s playing, a 1667 instrument by tradition — sings with a tone that is fuller and rosier than the genre strictly requires. Listen to the way he shapes the rubato in Musin’s Mazurka de Concert. Not showy, not indulgent, but with the unmistakable fingerprint of someone who has actually studied Wieniawski and Sarasate and knows what a real mazurka rhythm wants. The pizzicati snap without ever sounding brittle.

Elsewhere the disc is comfort food, gorgeously prepared. “By the Sleepy Lagoon” arrives draped in a warmth that borders on syrup but never quite tips over. Coates knew exactly how much sentiment an English seaside tune could bear, and Jenkins understood the joke and the beauty simultaneously. Jack Byfield’s “Melodies of Britain” is shameless, stitching “Danny Boy” to “Loch Lomond” to “John Peel” with the efficiency of a tailor working a wedding party, but it’s expertly stitched, and the ear doesn’t mind the seams.

The real interest lies in hearing how a violinist with genuine classical chops handles material beneath his technical ceiling. Hahn’s “If My Songs Were Only Winged,” a salon miniature descended, however distantly, from the mélodie tradition of Duparc and Fauré, gets a reading of real tenderness, the portamento judged with restraint rather than splashed on. Marchetti’s “Fascination,” already a chestnut by 1951, comes off with an unforced charm. Jenkins doesn’t oversell it, doesn’t wink at the audience the way some Palm Court fiddlers do.

Kai Mortensen’s “The Laughing Violin” is a novelty and knows it: two minutes of good-natured mimicry, the kind of encore piece that used to bring down provincial town halls. Charles Williams’s “Jealous Lover” is more substantial, and generous too. It opens space for Reginald Kilbey’s cello and Byfield’s piano, so the “orchestra” briefly contracts to trio proportions and you hear the interior voices, the give and take of a working ensemble rather than a soloist with accompaniment.

Massenet’s “Meditation” from Thaïs and Bach’s “Air on the G String” sit here as they always do on these programs, the classical alibi, the moment where the announcer could remind listeners this was still serious music underneath the frivolity. Jenkins plays both without condescension. The Bach in particular has a clean, unfussy line; no excessive vibrato smearing the harmonic motion, which some light-orchestra fiddlers of the era could not resist doing.

Does any of this belong beside the great violin recordings of the century, the Kreislers, the Heifetzes? Of course not, and it would be absurd criticism to measure it that way. But within its own frame, and against other surviving Grand Hotel broadcasts and studio sides — Sandler’s earlier recordings, the slightly cooler style of Reginald Leopold who followed Jenkins later — this holds up remarkably well. The transfers are decent, a bit of surface haze here and there, nothing disqualifying.

A minor discovery, then, but a genuine one. Jenkins deserved a longer life and, one suspects, a somewhat different career. What we have instead is this: forty minutes of impeccably turned salon music, played by a man who could have done more, and who did this so well you almost stop wishing he had.