Customer Reviews

Very Best of André Rieu

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

 

 

Apparently, this album was ripped from a set of LP vinyl disks. The cover art seems to confirm this. This being the case, there is no way to know how old or what condition the original disks were in. There is a lot of noise and distortion in many of the tracks. Some sounds like surface noise and the distortion sounds like a worn stylus.

At any rate, the music is great with a variety of waltzes, polka, etc. Many tracks are live performances, apparently in Denmark, where the audience enthusiastically sings along. If you can tolerate the noise, here are 40 tracks of outstanding music, most of which very clear.

For the price, I recommend this download even with its faults.

The audio quality is so bad it's hard to tell if this could be Andre or not. If it is it must be from his very early years as the production is so poor. I'll pass and stick his newer recordings which are always of such high quality musically and artistically.

The album case was cracked with I received it but the CD was ok. I am enjoying the music

Some of the very best of Andre Rieu's music! Excellent Value for the price. Would make a great gift to introduce Andre Rieu to someone.

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.