Review – Buddy Holly With The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
True Love Ways
(Decca)
★★★★☆
Building on the success of their previous projects providing new orchestral arrangements for original recordings by Elvis and Roy Orbison, the RPO scored a UK Top 10 album when they turned their attention to a dozen Buddy Holly songs in 2018. Now it’s back in a newly-reissued form.
We’re not in unchartered musical territory here, of course, as many of Holly’s songs already featured strings in their original incarnations. In this new form, those rather low-key and budget backings are replaced by the lush, expansive sound of the Royal Philharmonic, although the delicacy of the majority of Holly’s songs calls for understated arrangements rather than the bells-and-whistles grandstanding that featured on the Presley and Orbison projects.
True Love Ways opens with a rather lovely John Barryesque sweep to the title track’s swelling introduction that sets it up nicely – Holly’s vocals are upfront in the mix, never overshadowed by the orchestra. Meanwhile, a time period-appropriate pizzicato backing jollies along It Doesn’t Matter Anymore much like the original.
And that plucked string approach is also applied to the delicately melodic Everyday and Heartbeat – although the guitars are retained for the most part in the latter, including its lilting solo from Buddy.
Lush & Expansive Sound
The orchestral heft is felt most obviously on the fullness of the arrangement for Raining In My Heart. The song also reappears as a final bonus track featuring singer-songwriter Gregory Porter for a newly-created ‘duet’. And it makes for an unexpected highlight, with Porter doing a fine job of supporting Holly’s original vocals.
On the rockier material included here, such as Oh, Boy! and That’ll Be The Day, the orchestra takes more of a back seat, letting the original Crickets shine. The thumping backbeat that was such a feature of Peggy Sue is left intact, too.
Don’t expect anything too bold – these are sensitive additions to the originals and not radical reworkings. On occasion, though, you do wish the orchestra would go for broke. Words Of Love’s new Eleanor Rigby-style strings was an idea that could have been expanded further. It’s this fine collection’s only missed opportunity.
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