As conductor of the Boston Pops for almost half a century, Arthur Fiedler brought popular classical music and pop music with a classical twist to the people. Leonard Bernstein was providing an intellectual and more glamorous musical education for Americans, but Fielder was coming into our living rooms on a weekly basis with his Boston Pops concerts. Fielder and the Boston Pops produced a lot of records, mostly with RCA in the 1950s through the 1970s, most of which offered everything from classical overtures and ballet pieces to movies themes and the hits of the Beatles.
It was inevitable that with over a hundred albums the Boston Pops would do the Fab Four. They were the first orchestra to perform the songs of the Beatles in 1964 when Fiedler returned from a trip to Liverpool ("I Want to Hold Your Hand" was the first one they ever did). These are not just these songs played by a classical orchestra but rather arrangements done for this purpose. You will notice that one of the standard ways of arranging these songs is to use the chorus as the introduction for the song (e.g., "Eleanor Rigby," "Hey Jude"). If you can guess from the drumming at the beginning of "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" or "Yellow Submarine" what those songs are then you are way ahead of me, but that is the sense of fun that Fiedler brought to these songs by giving them the John Phillip Sousa treatment.
Sometimes it is such the simple elegance of doing the guitar parts with strings, as with "And I Love Her," or even the staccato strings of "Penny Lane," that makes the songs enjoyable. Then there are the mood chances invoked by turning "A Little Help From My Friends" into a work of minor chords. My assumption is that if you pick up this album you will know the songs, but not these arrangements, so you should just forget about looking at the play list and just listen to the music.
There are a quartet of bonus tracks on the album, featuring live versions of "I Want to Hold Your Hand," "And I Love Her," and "A Hard Day's Night." These are not different versions of these songs, which is too bad because I thought it would be interesting to see if the Pops arrangers could come up with different classical ways of doing the same songs. The final track is actually Fiedler talking about how the Pops came to play the Beatles music, as a "novelty." I have not listened to this sort of music for a while, but it makes for nice background music and there are more albums out there. Remember "Saturday Night Fiedler"?