Jean dos santos mantovani biography

The music of Mantovani is so middle of the road that your local council could use it to measure precisely where the white line goes.

His lush string arrangements of popular tunes have been dismissed as worthless by self-appointed musical gatekeepers since the first albums appeared in the early 1950s, looked down upon as “music for not listening”, condemned as cloying schmaltz.

The man himself, who clocked up over 100m album sales, could afford to be sanguine about critical coolness towards his work.

Labelling it “schmaltz” was the only thing that came anywhere near getting under his skin.

“Schmaltz has something saccharine about it,” he said. “I like to think my music has good taste.”

Mantovani’s sound has been imitated so often that it’s easy to forget how innovative it was when it first emerged, a high-pitched wall of strings shimmering out of postwar austerity and cascading through the realm of
p