The Pink Panther, Moon River and more much-loved favourites in a luscious celebration marking the centenary of one of the greatest composers - Henry Mancini

Mancini was more than one of the greatest composers in the history of film music. He was also one of the most versatile musicians of his or any time.

Such is Mancini’s renown in the worlds of film and TV music, that The Music from Peter Gunn won the first-ever Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1959, beating off Frank Sinatra’s Come Fly with Me and Ella Fitzgerald’s …Sings the Irving Berlin Song Book among others.

The album More Music from Peter Gunn was nominated the following year, while his scores for Breakfast at Tiffany’s and The Pink Panther also earned nods during the 60s.

It was his understanding of composition that led to his music’s longevity. Mancini’s biographer John Caps said that even as a young man, he would be found “taking apart a Chopin mazurka or Schumann sonata in order to play,” which helped him see the ways in which the “puzzle of form, meter, melody, harmony, and counterpoint had been solved by previous composers”.

He stood on the shoulders of giants, then, but arguably outgrew even them over the course of a career which saw him win four Academy Awards, a Golden Globe, and 20 Grammy Awards, as well as, in 1995, a posthumous Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

Mancini’s is a career that would be impossible to sum up in a single evening, but Outwater attempts to at least encapsulate a few of his most recognisable high points with a programme which includes classics such as Lujon (also known as ‘Slow Hot Wind’) with its seductively slinky melody, and Moon River, as well as his instantly recognisable themes from 1963 detective comedy The Pink Panther and of course the aforementioned 1950s-60s crime drama Peter Gunn.

Then there’s the iconic Days of Wine and Roses, the title song from the 1962 romantic drama film of the same name – which earned Mancini one each of his many Oscars and Grammys.

Then there are various gems from the two genres that Mancini pioneered: lounge music, and space-age pop, from the likes of Burt Bacharach, Les Baxter and Juan Garcia Esquivel.

Bacharach’s Casino Royale, Esquivel’s Mucha Muchacha and Baxter’s Shooting Star are among the hits on the playlist, along with Julius Wechter’s Spanish Flea – all of them popular around the world, and arguably none would exist without Mancini’s pioneering influence on music composition.

Jess Gillam presents this Prom, while we are also promised that she will be joined by a “very special guest”.

Intriguing…