coolermaster

I forgot to mention (besides the ratings) that this compilation, curated by Dori Ghezzi along with the second part, is the most comprehensive and well-made. Each song has been remastered while taking into account the original sound with the latest studio digital techniques... and you can tell... some songs shine with their own light... Especially those from the second period.
IDOEC part 1 and the second part is all there is to know about De Andrè...
It's a shame about the (serious) omission of Geordie in the original version and "Nuvole Barocche," among the very few songs from De Andrè's early period that I adore...

I must admit that thanks to this box set I discovered 3 songs by De André (whom I detest) that made me shout miracle (and another 3 or 4 that really catch my attention): they are "Dormono sulla collina," "L'inverno di Vivaldi" (sublime), and (I don’t even know if it’s De André) a certain "Ave Maria" that is almost Progressive and literally drives me crazy! Beautiful...
The rest, the De André before 1975, and that is before De Gregori, as always makes my testicles drop...

Classical music is quite a chaos. For two simple and obvious reasons. The first is that none (or almost none) of the great interpreters ever stepped into a recording studio, and the second is that it was the first musical genre to be widely recorded on disc, since the advent of the first gramophones... The point is: Kempff, Brendel, Horowitz, Richter, Rubinstein were great, truly great, but at that time "capturing" the tone, colors, and timbre of a piano was extremely difficult... “today,” meaning for about the last ten to fifteen years, digital techniques have reached "near perfection," and if you listen to any David Fray playing Schubert on his Steinway, the lights, colors, and sensations emanating are things that were impossible to untangle 30 or 40 years ago...
Many say that Toscanini was the greatest conductor of all time, even superior to Karajan, Solti, Bernstein, etc... It's a pity that most of his work was in the '30s and '40s...
I don’t know about you, but I find it hard to judge a piece of music when there are all kinds of interferences, and the sound of the instruments seems tinny...
Perhaps the issue with classical music is this: we listened to it as kids on worn-out records with inadequate hi-fi setups, and then we said to ourselves: no, it’s not for me...
When I was 20, I put together the stereo that I carried with me for 15 years (something terrifying because it sounded so good), I (re)discovered genres like Jazz and classical music that suddenly started to speak to me.... And today, thanks to new digital techniques that even challenge MP3 compression (often winning... I’m an audio engineer and I know what I’m talking about), listening to the Nocturnes finally "silent," yet so alive and bright is wonderful...
Rubinstein is part of the "romantic" clique alongside Horowitz, Pires, and Ashkenazy....
Listening to Pollini's Nocturnes recorded 2 or 3 years ago for Deutsche is another thing.... I can’t say whether they are better or worse, but they are certainly different... Sideral, cold, introspective.... Not exactly for a "make-out session" like those of Maria Joao Pires.....
Best regards.

Scaruffi is EVIL....period...
Yes, I also listen to the Pet Shop Boys, whose most underrated album I passionately love is that synth-pop gem called Actually from 1987....so?
The good Mr. "soft machine" makes me this simple....can I say it or is it a crime?
Ah, I also love Bowie, the Beatles, the Floyd, the Crimson, and many others.....including Metallica, Black Sabbath, and Iron Maiden....
I repeat: so?
If I want to blast "My Friend of Misery" at full volume at 9 in the morning, I do it and I enjoy it like a beetle....The same goes for when some mornings I put on Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, or something by Chopin....maybe a nice martial Polonaise…..
I repeat: so???

eco good mrbisturi, specify: FOR YOU....

Strange because every time I listen to a record by Miles Davis or John Coltrane or "things" like Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto or Rachmaninov's second piano concerto or Beethoven's fourth concerto, I get so emotional that I cry... And there are no words there... evidently there must be something wrong with me... hahahahah.... regards

If there's one thing I hate, it's sarcasm... I've never been able to stand it. The jabs at the band, the flagbearers of metal, the band that has shaped the dreams of millions of teenagers in the '80s more than any other, that has created an enduring iconography really piss me off. Dylan and De André make me sick (except for a few things from each), but I don't express sarcasm toward them. And so it goes for dozens of other bands, singer-songwriters, and composers.
That said: I haven't heard the album... It's true that for me the Maiden have been stuck at Seventh Son, and the comparison with the first two with Di Anno is another thing that annoys me quite a bit. It's a bit like those who say that Pink Floyd were born and died with Barrett...
The first two works were still full of a raw uncertainty, Di Anno's rough voice was halfway between Punk and NWOBHM à la Motörhead, but it was only with The Number Of The Beast that the Maiden "were born," it was only when Dickinson and Harris took the helm definitively...
Best regards

As a child, I always hated him, or rather, I never fully digested him, and at home, I had tons of my father's and aunt's 45s and 33s of '50s and '60s rock 'n' roll...
I would lose myself instead in the notes of Chuck Berry, Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent (who, beyond "Be Bop A Lula," created some amazing things), Little Richard, and Buddy Holly... Those guys had guts, I thought…
Let’s not even talk about the Elvis records from the '60s, all syrupy and insipid, stuff that I understood even back then made Bacharach seem like Beethoven in comparison... Before the usual late re-evaluations of the end of the century...
Today, in hindsight, I say: he was the first white ROCK STAR, who played music that saw blacks as the ultimate creators…
He wasn't as crazy as Jerry Lee Lewis, didn't look as bad as Holly, wasn't as much of a loser as Vincent, and wasn't as dark as Cash; he was the rock star with a feigned scandalous image, but in reality loved by young and old alike, with a clean-cut face...
Because in reality, everyone was making out to the rhythm of "Love Me Tender" and other syrupy songs... harmless little tunes, even though "Jailhouse Rock" will always remain THE ROCK par excellence, an essential piece...
With Elvis, the rock star was born, a figure that hadn't existed before...
That he was to Chuck Berry or Johnny Cash what Jim Morrison was to Lou Reed or Iggy Pop goes without saying...

Starting from the premise that reviewing a compilation featuring such different bands is a daunting task, I am really fed up with the usual four comments from the same four dusty old timers...
Journey, for example, were the champions of AOR, born from the ashes of the Santana Band of Woodstock fame, just to say, and "Who's Crying Now" is the jewel of their masterpiece "Escape"... We're talking about gentlemen musicians with two huge balls!!!
The Human League were great representatives of electric and decadent rock...
Pop? Who said Pop? There’s very little Pop in this collection... Lots of Funky, and a bit of Disco, which is now on the decline, supplanted by more electronic sounds and "wave" coming from England...
But honestly, who under 40 even knows what “the Time of the Apples” was like, with the unforgettable Sophie Marceau, the parties when you waited, awkward and sweaty, for the inevitable arrival of "Reality" to invite the girl of your dreams to dance... No, I don’t think these young people today have even the faintest idea of what it was like back then, how it was... And how we experienced the "soundtracks" of our childhood/adolescence...
I have listened to everything in my life, from Bach's Brandenburg Concertos to Porcupine Tree, including Jazz, but there are certain songs, certain melodies, that as soon as I hear them I feel a leap in my heart, an indescribable emotion takes hold of me... Even if I consciously recognize that they aren't masterpieces, every time "Words" by FR David starts playing, a song by Modern Talking, or "Take on Me" by A-HA, I can't help but get emotional... And this happens even to my dear friend who in life plays and listens only to Jazz...
I wonder why?

The point, my intellectual friends, is that this is the music that an entire generation of people loved, lived... After the excesses and escapades of the previous decade... Songs that those aged 35 to 45 cannot not know... If today there were just a single cent of that creativity, of that people who knew how to create riffs with 2 chords that are remembered even 30 years later, we would be set... Because music, dear ones, is not just King Crimson, Bob Dylan or Frank Zappa... Music is something more global, that touches the emotions of each one of us... And those songs, for those who lived them, stuck inside the soul like childhood and adolescence of those who experienced that extraordinary decade...
Regards.