Customer Reviews

Songs From Liquid Days: Crouch End Festival Chorus

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This album is pretty good, and any Glass-lovers will enjoy it immensely. It could, however, also act as a smooth introduction to Glass to those who are lovers of choral music since the Crouch End Chorus perform most of the pieces extremely well and the vocal arrangements are, on the whole, rather good.

The disc is split into three parts. The first three tracks are 'Three Songs', songs written in 1984 to celebrate Québec's 450 years (1534-1984) as a province. These pieces are entirely choral, no orchestration in sight. They're good, but not typical catchy Glass fare.

The second part is simply the fourth track, a rendition of 'Vessels' from Koyaanisqatsi. It's actually a fine performance, since Vessels was always well suited for a chorus. The minimal orchestration is a little slack at times, and a lot of the lower registers are missing, but this track isn't bad.

The third part is the 'main performance' as it were, and is comprised of six tracks from Glass's 'Songs From Liquid Days', an 80's collaboration with artists such as Paul Simon and Suzanne Vega.

Some of these pieces are extremely operatic, especially track 6, 'Changing Opinion', expertly sung by Wills Morgan. The orchestration on that track being especially good. 'Open The Kingdom' is also done well, and although not quite up to par with the original, is a fun performance none-the-less.

The only weak track on this album is 'Lightning,' the track Glass wrote with Suzanne Vega. While this is one of my favourite Glass pieces of all time, this performance does it no justice. For some odd reason the arranger chose for most of the song to be sung by the soprano section, and as such, suffers from being too high and 'screeching'. The orchestration is also a little unprofessional on this piece. However, even with these criticisms, the whole CD is extremely enjoyable, and this Glass fan loves it.

Please, Mr. Glass. Stick to composing music, but don't write any more songs.