A Double CD entitled "Top Twenty - Your hundred best tunes". A Dodgy Concept if ever there was one. Made even dodgier by the presence of a Radio 2 logo, before the days when Radio 2 became the station of choice for Eighties Pop Tarts...
Ain't gonna work, is it?
Except, that the CDs contain such gems as:
- Arrival of the Queen of Sheba;
- Pachabel's Kanon (my friend Clive declared his love for this; I happened to mention this to my brother, he groaned and showed me the cello part - he was in school junior orchestra at the time aged maybe 13, the same four notes over and over and over again. He didn't like it...);
- Mozart's sublime Ave Verum Corpus - the piece that contains my equal favourite phrase - interval - in the entire musical canon that I have ever heard, ever, in my life;
- Sibelius's Finlandia, which is just wonderful;
- Bizet's Pearl Fisher's Duet, which is almost certainly the favourite recording I possess by Luciano Pavarotti. I have decidedly mixed feelings about Pav. at his peak, he was good. No, he was better than good. He was technically superb. But I don't feel any warmth or personality coming through his voice, and certainly would never dream of using terms such as 'gorgeous' or 'lush'. And he is certainly always better on audio than video...
Of course, these are, ultimately, only bleeding chunks, making you beg for more, (many of the other, unmentioned tracks are chunks from stuff I have in full), but really rather appropriate for the tedium of phlog re-categorisation...
One chunk I have elsewhere is Wolfie's Clarinet Concerto 2nd Movement. I have to confess this always leaves me crying out for Wolfie's Clarinet 5tet!
It also contains Mascagni's Intermezzo from Cavelleria Rusticana, which is one of the weirdest pieces of music, ever. For me, that is, not objectively. I have so many different versions of it - it is such a popular one for compilations, plus I have it in context, too. I even have it with words on an arias album. Sometimes I really like it, sometimes I really hate it. there is no in-between, and there is no logical explanation.
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