Jethro Tull
A Passion Play - An Extended Performance

Here I am reviewing another box set collection. The deluxe version I am about to review is the album A Passion Play, a great concept album released in 1973. However, I will not be reviewing the standard version, but the one that can easily be defined as an Expanded Edition, that is A Passion Play - An Extended Performance, a special edition that, curiously, did not come out on the same day as the album's release, but was released at the end of the month! In other words, it is the 41st Anniversary Edition. I should mention that A Passion Play is not my favorite album; it's a CD that I appreciated a lot after ten successive listens, also because it's an album that initially seems a bit indigestible, but when you manage to understand it and listen to it from start to finish, it's truly a real pleasure, and you classify it as one of the most interesting listens one can have. This is a record that can be quietly likened to Too Old To Rock'N'Roll: Too Young To Die! in the sense that both tell a story and refer to something extra-musical; what differentiates the two albums is that while Too Old To Rock'N'Roll: Too Young To Die! was designed as a real mini prog opera (this becomes clear if you have the collector's box set Too Old To Rock'N'Roll: Too Young To Die! - The TV Special Edition released in 2015), A Passion Play does not reveal this type of intent also because, in the Standard Edition, the album is presented in the same way as Thick As A Brick, which is a single, long suite divided into two parts due to the necessity to turn the vinyl over.

A Passion Play - An Extended Edition, however, seems to contradict the standard version, because if you take a look at the tracklist printed on the back of the box set, you can see the titles of the various tracks. This special edition (which includes two CDs and two DVDs) is highly recommended to those who appreciated the album in question because, on the second CD, there are the Chateau D'Herouville Sessions, and it is incredible that, by listening to the recording sessions for A Passion Play, you can hear songs that were discarded and included in the album Warchild (including Skating Away On The Thin Ice Of The New Day). In fact, I don't understand why there is often a tendency to reissue something that had already appeared many years earlier: the recording sessions for A Passion Play, in fact, had already appeared in the double anthology Nightcap: The Unreleased Masters 1973-1991 released in 1993.