Deryk Barker writes:

>Ronald Binge's Elizabethan Serenade, that's another matter: diddy
>dum-dum, diddy dum-dum

Barbirolli called this piece a four-minute masterpiece, and made a fine
recording of it.

He's not far wrong.  As a piece of music, it's most beautifully crafted,
with not a wasted note.  The way the opening figure turns out to be really
a delectable counterpoint to the main melody (or is it really the main
melody itself?) still surprises and delights after hundreds of hearings.

The "Mahler of Derby" wrote other fine pieces (including an Evening
Service formerly much-beloved of choirboys, for the name if nothing else
- "Binge in A Flat") but none quite so perfect as Elizabethan Serenade
...  even an egregious German version I once heard, with full chorus and
Viennese lilt, couldn't sink it.

"Elizabethan Serenade" proves, once and for all, that size doesn't matter.

Christopher Webber,  Blackheath, London,  UK.
http://www.nashwan.demon.co.uk/zarzuela.htm
"ZARZUELA!"