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Annunzio Paolo Mantovani sold zillions of records with sweet cascading strings, starting with "Charmaine" in 1951, which made the American Top 10. "I'm a string man," he said; "I know the capabilities of the violin. I know what it can do and what it can't." By the middle 1960s he'd sold upward of 16 million LPs in the States, but he hadn't had a real hit single since Exodus, and his recording of the main theme therefrom was clobbered in the marketplace by Ferrante and Teicher, who were piano men. For reasons unknown, he was persuaded to take on this simple but lovely theme by German composer James Last, which had gotten some traction with vocal recordings by Wayne Newton and Eddie Fisher. The patented Mantovani strings are very much in evidence. Inexplicably, however, the arranger — definitely not Ronald Binge, with whom Mantovani had worked in the early 1950s — decided to supplement the strings with an electric guitar, presumably an effort to gin up sales among those crazy teenagers. It worked, sort of: "Games That Lovers Play" bubbled under the Hot 100 for a couple of weeks, the last time the Maestro came into proximity to the pop singles chart, and was deemed worthy enough for Mantovani's Golden Hits LP.
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Where can I get this on CD?
Oddly enough, it's not on Mantovani's Golden Hits (Decca/London 800 085-2), which duplicates the artwork, but not the track list, of the original LP (London LL 3483/PS 483 stereo). The one CD source I've been able to track down is Collectors' Mantovani 2, on Vocalion CDLK 4233, which is currently not listed on Dutton Vocalion's Web site. The iTunes store has the current issue of Golden Hits, which, as noted, lacks this tune.
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Copyright © 2010 by Charles G. Hill
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