Customer Reviews

Live In Dresden: The Wedding at the Opera

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

 

 

After viewing this on TV I decided to order not only the DVD but also the CD. The music is just wonderful.

"Live in Dresden" is the fifth Andre Rieu CD I purchased from Amazon, and the only one which proved disappointing. It is a live performance so the environment may have interfered with its recorded quality (relatively flat sound and inconsistent volume levels). It is worth listening to, but I'd give a much stronger recommendation to Andre's "The Homecoming" (my favorite), "Greatest Hits" or "At the Movies', all of which are more dynamic in both their orchestral and vocal sounds.

Andre surely is the most successful classical musician in the world for a reason - he always gives his audience a wonderful musical experience and this new CD recorded at the Dresden Opera House is one of his best yet. Got the DVD as well so I can watch the program and have the CD for the car - best of both worlds!

My father always raved about Andre Rieu, when he saw him on TV. Someone gave him an Andre Rieu greatest hits CD for his 98th birthday last year. Not only did he like it, but my husband and I loved it too. Dad lives with us and he listens to music almost every day. We bought him this CD for Christmas last year and it is a joy to listen to. Very upbeat. We don't have to close the door now, when he's listening to his music.

Great Selection and performance, since I was born and reasid in Austria, I'm probably prejudiced. Highly recommended!

The music is just beautiful as always. What is so annoying is the applause after each piece of music. It distracts so much. I am disappointed.

Mr Rieu 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 that Scottish hag whose name escapes me right now), 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.