Best of Andre Rieu View large Image Artist Andre Rieu Format Audio CD Average Rating Our Price £6.99

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Customer Reviews

Reviewer
M. Shortman
A really fantastic CD and well worth adding to anyones collection - including Mr Yelofs
Mr. G. Yeloff
If you genuinely love Classical music avoid this.Rieu disturbingly cuts up classical pieces and makes once great Art sound either cheapened into sanitised 'lovers music' ,or dissects tunes from their original context into clappalong pap for his mass fans. Rieu cuts and avoids any music which cannot be turned into his distorted view of classical music as only being written for entertaining masses with easy listening pap.I pity the poor composers he cuts up and uses for his easy listening muzak. That is why you wont hear him do symphonies.Yes he will turn a Shostakovich waltz into a singalong for his many adoring fans but he would'nt dare play them any substantial music from the same composer, so you can bet you won'tbe hearing Rieu conduct Shostakovich's Fifth.Inconvenient for him that most decent composers music CANT be used for a clappalong or as muzak so he removes the challenging bits!! There is no attempt to try and educate his audience-so NO Mozart piano concertos either. His kitsch 'orchestra' of permanently smily ballroom princesses (and this image is supposed to attract young people?!!) does'nt even play the music well. J Strauss waltzes are a good example. He plays them often robotically and synthetically-just listen to the Vienna Philharmonic do J Strauss and this becomes obvious. He cuts up Bolero (why?) and rearranges it with a Yamaha keyboard even though Ravel was a genius at orchestration.His Ode to Joy debases the visionary revolutionary Beethoven into easy listening music(he obviously cuts most of the original movement as it might upset his audience) and has the arrogance to add his own cheesy brassy bits to it. This is like repainting the Mona Lisa with spray paint. As another reviewer said on Amazon (Joost Kiefte) despite all this glitz the musical value 'is nill'. In an age when Classical music does'nt get much media exposure and kids are'nt educated about it as they used to be we really don't need Rieu to give kids the idea that this is Classical music. It is not. It is a kitsch distorted view of music and is totally disrespectful to the composers he uses for his marketing exercise.
S. Smith
I was pleased with this disc as it showcased a lot of Mr Rieu's musicality.