<<  -- 3 --  Patric Standford    Happy and profound

The CD also contains four of the many lighter pieces which Potter was so much admired for producing with colourful and humourous artistry. They include his arrangement of the Dublin ballad Finnegan's Wake and the first of his series of Irish Fantasies, which is a gentle and affectionate treatment of the two beautiful airs My Lagan Love and An Páistín Fionn (The fair child). The tune at the heart of the Variations is known as The Wild Colonial Boy, subjected to a sequence of spirited yet not too devious transformations. There is also Potter's earliest orchestral score, a lively Overture to a Kitchen Comedy, written in 1936 when he was eighteen, betraying an ebullient, extrovert Irishness [listen -- track 4, 1:12-2:01].

Archie Potter died in 1980, leaving a modest but significantly substantial corpus of superbly crafted music, arranged and original, both happy and profound, and the memory of a professional and erudite communicator with a fine sense of humour. He is worthy of our attention, and this CD is for all who would know him better.

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