Like an Old Fashioned Waltz carries English pop romanticism to its extreme, elongating simple folk melodies to accommodate magniloquent orchestration. As a result, Waltz treads the line between schmaltz and grandeur, fortunately tending to the latter thanks to Harry Robinson's string charts, which echo such turn-of-the-century composers as Delius and Elgar. At its heart are four long mood pieces: "Like an Old Fashioned Waltz," "At the End of the Day," "Carnival" and "No End." The title cut advances the album's main theme — the wish to live in an atmosphere of perpetual reflection where dreams are allowed free reign and "the moonlight shines down on the Hollywood world/And the heroine waits for her beau to return." Likewise "Carnival" and "No End," with impressionistic images of twilight landscapes and seasonal change, sustain a spirit of hopeless personal nostalgia.

Denny flounders only when she injects, for a change of pace, two inferior American nightclub songs, "Whispering Grass (Don't Tell the Trees)," and "Until the Real Thing Comes Along." Here, banal cocktail lounge arrangements take the place of orchestration, while Denny's folk phrasing is inappropriate to the idiom. Disregarding these two mistakes, however, Old Fashioned Waltz represents Sandy Denny's most successful attempt yet to wed English folk to classical music. (RS 164)

STEPHEN HOLDEN