Customer Reviews

Very Best of

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An excellent sampler of Herr Karas' music.

No collection of his music would be complete without a reference to "The Third Man", and this release includes three or four pieces from the film on the first CD.

The main focus of this set are the many examples of Austrian and German traditional tunes and some popular medleys as well. A very entertaining CD which never seems to fall into the trap of becoming too "schmaltzy".

The overall sound quality of the CD is surprisingly good - the excerpts from "The Third Man" suffer from some "noise" but are still very listenable. Put it this way - given that the only remaining source material is the film itself, I don't think you'll find anything better!

A great, value-for-money CD. Highly recommended.

Apart from the music of "the third man" one can imagine of sitting in an old world coffee house in Vienna listening to favorites on the zither

These are the original recordings from someones collection that had been played repeatedly. It is poor sound quality at its best but beautiful music if you don't mind all of the scratches and pops. These are not cleaned and filtered.

The indelible sound of Anton Karas and his zither was to take me back to my childhood (well so I hoped) but unfortunately this wasn't to be. The double disc album seems far too copious in my view, and needs some severe editing to prune out what could best be described as just 'fiddling' on a zither. Its a wonderful instrument in the right hands and Karas has the touch but this isn't supported by the music in this case. One of the discs in this album wouldn't read and that substantially reduced overall effectiveness.

The 'third man theme' which launched Karas as an icon of the 50's remains his best in my view, with the revised version better still. I found the album bit disappointing overall.

Bill Gifford

This is something different. You will remember this from your childhood but will not have heard it for a long while. A nice treat. Orson Wells the Harry lime Theme Song is instantly recognized as from ("that movie, what was it called"?) The Third Man.