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DAVID MELLOR

Lang Lang The Disney Book DG (2CDs), out now ★★★★★

Dick Emery should have been around to review Lang Lang’s latest assault on our eardrums. I hear his verdict now: ‘Ooh you are awful… but I like you!’

This DG album is a clever idea because it recognises an important but often overlooked aspect of Disney’s art – the quality of the music.

His first full-length cartoon, Snow White from 1937, had two, for me, outstanding songs: Someday My Prince Will Come and, perhaps even better, Whistle While You Work. These were composed by the Oscar-winning Frank Churchill, who also wrote the music for Dumbo, Bambi and Three Little Pigs (Who’s Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf?) before, in a fit of depression, he shot himself at his keyboard aged only 40. A real loss.

Another giant of those days was the composer/arranger Leigh Harline, who won an Oscar for one of my all-time favourite songs from any genre, When You Wish Upon A Star (Pinocchio, 1940).

For more than seven decades, Disney’s films have had generally excellent music, especially things like Mary Poppins, The Jungle Book, or The Lion King, all featured here. This culminates in their most recent triumph, my fouryear-old granddaughter Clementine’s absolute favourite, Frozen, from which two songs appear: Let It Go and Do You Want To Build A Snowman?

Such is the quality of the music that you don’t need to fret too much about the playing of Lang Lang (right, known to critics as Bang Bang) who, as usual, plays loudly and insensitively almost throughout. Clementine never mentioned it once.

It’s not just the piano playing here that leaves a lot to be desired, but much of the singing. Scraping the very bottom of the barrel is Lang Lang’s wife, Gina Alice, who absolutely murders When You Wish Upon A Star. Somehow the song survives.

Recommended then, even to the musical. Confession time: I played it through a number of times. Ingesting alcohol does help though.

In case you were worried, Clementine gets by without.

Tv & Puzzles

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2022-09-25T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-09-25T07:00:00.0000000Z

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