MUSICIANmilestones...recent obits of classical and traditional popular music performers and composers
.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Starlight Symphony conductor Cyril Ornadel, died on June 22 aged 86, wrote the score for the musical Pickwick
Cyril Ornadel, for many years conducted the orchestra for Sunday Night at the London Palladium, the most popular television variety show of the 1950s. Ornadel had enjoyed an earlier hit song with Portrait of My Love. Recorded under duress by the balladeer Matt Monro, who disliked it intensely on first hearing, it went to No 3 in 1960, and has become a modern songbook standard. Cyril Ornadel was born in London on December 2 1924, the son of a dress manufacturer who assumed he would join the family business. When Cyril went his own way, his father effectively had him thrown out of the Royal College of Music by telling it that his son was in breach of the rules by playing piano in a nightclub and dating a fellow student. Ornadel recorded several MGM albums of standards with the studio orchestra known as The Starlight Symphony.
. 
