A Night On Bald Mountain

These are very solid performances from Slatkin, but the recording is the star here. The Elite recordings from Aubort and Nickrenz are simply some of the finest analogue (or any) recordings of orchestras in real acoustic spaces ever made. And Mobile Fidelity, as always, has done them justice, in full. The results are startlingly realistic sounding in timbre, coherence, transparency and staging.

These well known pieces are presented in superb sound. Carlo Ponti Jr. is the son of Carlo Ponti Sr. and Sophia Loren and is a regular conductor of the Russian National Orchestra.

The Legacy Collection plunders the deepest depths of the Disney sound archive to collect, with unprecedented completeness, the audio histories of 11 classic animated films from each era of the Disney Studios, from Lady and the Tramp and Aristocats to Little Mermaid and the Lion King to Toy Story and Wreck-It Ralph, with one more CD devoted just to Disneyland. Each disc contains the full score of a film from opening to closing credits, unreleased rarities, and bonus material. Then there's the books.

Every so often, a piece of music comes along that defines a moment in popular culture history: Johann Strauss' operetta Die Fledermaus did this in Vienna in the 1870s; Jerome Kern's Show Boat did it for Broadway musicals of the 1920s; and the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album served this purpose for the era of psychedelic music in the 1960s. Saturday Night Fever, although hardly as prodigious an artistic achievement as those precursors, was precisely that kind of musical phenomenon for the second half of the '70s – ironically, at the time before its release, the disco boom had seemingly run its course, primarily in Europe, and was confined mostly to black culture and the gay underground in America…

Equipped with a warehouse of component Moog equipment, four phase shifters, a Roland space echo unit, a sitar, and other period electronic gear, Tomita re-enters the Russian classical repertoire with his take on Stravinsky's Firebird Suite (1919 version). As unique as Tomita's idiom was (and still is), this transcription is rather conservative for him, not as startling nor as playful as those of Debussy and Mussorgsky on his first two RCA albums. The by-now-familiar drifting, spacy, phasey Tomita treatment works best on the slower numbers in the suite, like "The Round of the Princesses," the "Berceuse," and the disembodied majesty of the opening of the "Finale." But the "Dance of the Firebird" and "Infernal Dance" aren't nearly as dynamic or colorful as any of Stravinsky's orchestral versions…

Excellent addition to any electronic music collection.
Equipped with a warehouse of component Moog equipment, four phase shifters, a Roland space echo unit, a sitar (!), and other period electronic gear, Tomita re-enters the Russian classical repertoire with his take on Stravinsky's Firebird Suite (1919 version).