Customer Reviews

Beatles Baroque

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

 

 

OK, it's no substitute for the actual albums, but the Boreades de Montreal find some interesting new things in arranging the music this way. Recommended.

u have to be a real music lover to appreciate this. i love both Beatles & classical music so when i first found this, i was pleasantly surprised. these are refined, whimsical,creative & varied chamber arrangements of some fine Beatle songs, not just orchestrations. what makes this cd truly great is it has the same level of creativity, taste & economy as the Beatles themselves. it has the Beatle spirit without being the Beatles. u can hear that there was a lot of thought put into each interpretation.

these are recordings that supplement the Beatles canon, discs i play when i'm in a Beatle mood, but need to take a short break from the original Beatle recordings.

not muzak as another reviewer said. highly recommended cd.

I know, one star is rather low, but I am just SO dissapointed with these 'Beatles Baroque' CDs, all 3 of them; and will perhaps submit this review to all three, as they all suffer the same problems. I love the Beatles, and had bought these when I, myself, was heavily involved in recording my own 'Baroque-ish' interpretations of the Beatles works, and had read a very good review of one CD (in an Early Music related journal), and bought these (not on Yahoo, or I might have been forwarned by the sound samples! Listen to those for sure before you buy!) And I will try to be very honest and constructive in my critisizm, so as not to sound like some of the 'bozos' who usually write some of the 'one-star' (and sometimes even 'five-star'?) reviews. The overall feeling of the recordings is that they are Beatles Elevator Music! But, in case you don't mind 'easy listening,' they suffer one major difference; where as 'Muzak' is tedious, boring, and purposefully non-engaging (easy to listen to, eh?) Muzak is nearly always VERY well performed, and amazingly tight, and in tune! BUT these 'Beatles Baroque' are NOT! The recorder players especially, but really the whole thing is so out-of-tune. Listen to 'Across the Universe' if it is on the sound samples? My ears hurt, sorry. And they all just sound so weak, and flimsy, and just plain 'not so in tune.' And the mics perhaps were all too far from anything, so it always has a very distant, not quite there feel, and sounds also as though everybody had their parts, knew they knew the tunes (we all think we 'know' all the Beatles songs?), and they might have practiced their parts a bit, and click... 'take one'..., etc. Sort of sounds like these might have been the tapes George Martin tossed out, when his first orchestra at the EMI studio, just didn't cut the cake, and he hired a better one? AND, really sounds like the director just copied all the Sony Band scores of the songs, cut and pasted the parts, and handed them out. There is no special anything about the arrangements at all. Not really 'Baroque' anything except the instruments? And a look at the CD photos will reveal that the guitarists have electric/accoustic modern guitars(!), probably playing exactly what John and George and Paul played, without any hint of Baroque continuo style. And the percussion is exactly what Ringo did, which is fine (Ringo was great), but JUST DOES NOT sound very Baroque to me at all. I was SO dissapointed too, as there are a few really hot players on the CDs, and even they do not shine as they do on their solo efforts. I do not feel that anyone at the recording had any passionate feel for the actual Beatles songs, or what the Beatles were saying and singing, but only studio musicians playing their parts that are on the music-stand in front of them. The purpose of these reviews is MAINLY (I think) to let buyers know sort of what they are getting, as we cannot return CDs when they dissapoint us! My aim is to do exactly that. I could not even listen to any single song all the way through an any of the 3 CDs, will never listen to any again, and see they even now have a 4th Greatest Hits version? Perhaps alot of work, and well intended, but these all just plain miss the mark!!!

I don't listen to classical music with any regularity, but I liked piggies, and Eleanor Rigby. George Harrison has always had a wide range of of musical talent, and I enjoyed the CD.

If you need tunes for your iPod to listen to whilst traveling on elevators, this is for you.