Customer Reviews

André Rieu - La vie est belle (Life is Beautiful)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I am a big fan of Andre Rieu but didnot enjoy this as much as several of his earlier recordings. It didn't have quite the zip as "Andre Rieu Live" or "The Holland I Love".

As soon as I saw Ravel's Bolero performed by Andre Rieu on PBS I wanted to have a copy of this beautiful album.. classical music that makes you get up and dance..

I purchased this album strictly because it had his version of Bolero on it. I never understood the fascination people have with this piece of music... until I went to an Andrei Rieu concert. What I learned was that Bolero is all about timing. Most musicians don't get it. Andrei Rieu does. From the very first soft notes in the beginning to the climactic end, the piece is mesmerizing. If this album only had this one piece on it, it would be worth having. However, you'll love the rest of it, too.

all i can say about andre,s music is i have over 15 cd,s and love ever one and rate them 5 stars.

That is of course not a personal remark against Mr Rieu who is quite a nice fellow with a pleasant, if at times slightly insipid, sense of humour and a keen business acumen. He got bored as the leader of a provincial Dutch symphony orchestra (no great wonder, what with their programming of the perennial favourites over and over again and pedestrian standard of musicianship, Rieu included; they have in the mean time mended their ways though), started a small string band which led an only marginally successful existence and every once in a while toured with a pick-up band recreating the music of the Strauss family and like composers. Since his chance hit "The Second Waltz", a watered down version of a Shostakovitch composition, he has seen the light and has since that time carefully edited, truncated and simplified the lighter classics and "classified" all kinds of overly familiar music. He dressed-up the lady musicians as fairy princesses, made his male musicians smirk, and have them all gaily wave their instruments and display publicly what a good time they all seem to be having (all carefully rehearsed, as are Rieu's carefully edited jokes; very little happens spontaneously). This eclectic mixture seems to hold an enormous appeal for millions of CD and DVD buyers and concert goers. No problem there. I do however have a problem with the fact that many "fans" seem to think that what Rieu presents is classical music, the real stuff. Actually, no, it's not. They also seem to think that Rieu is the world's greatest violinist; well, he plays a Stradivarius, so he should be, shouldn't he?. Well, no, he's not. Why do these "fans", without knowing Mozart from Wagner and a symphony from a concerto, so vociferously state that Rieu is the greatest, without ever having taken the trouble to listen to classical music (other than perhaps a Strauss waltz or a Puccini aria by Paul Potts or Ms Boyle), and that all who say otherwise are snobs, elitist, intellectual, arrogant and grumpy old men, who sit in cheerless concert halls listening to penguins playing music that no one understands? It's that ill-informed, lazy, overawed and reveling-in-an-underdog-position what irks me about the hype around Mr Rieu (for which he himself can hardly be blamed) and is reason for me to counterbalance the silly raving reviews ("me mum likes it, so it must be good") with one star.