Dance Orchid

Best known for his worldwide instrumental hit "Children," Italian dance producer Robert Miles was responsible for kick-starting the subgenre of dream-trance, a blissfully chilled-out fusion of Vangelis-style neo-classical music and progressive house beats, which helped him to bag a Brit Award and several Top Ten singles in the mid-'90s. Since his last commercial success, the Kathy Sledge-featuring "Freedom," 14 years ago, he's abandoned his celestial piano-based roots in favor of experimental trip-hop on 2001's Organik and ethnic jazz on 2004's Miles_Gurtu, a collaboration with Indian percussionist Trilok Gurtu. Seven years on, he returns from the musical wilderness with his fifth studio album, Th1Rt3En, and another new sound that further distances himself from his Euro-dance beginnings.

Once upon a time it was virtually unheard of for musical performers to write their own songs. That was the province of a separate breed, the professional songwriters who worked for music publishers in New York's Brill Building, or else touted their wares down the Tin Pan Alleys of the world. Essential to the whole process were the vocalists, because someone had to sing the songs.These were often under contract with a specific dance band. In the parlance of the day, these singers were often referred to as 'crooners'. The hundred tracks on this 4-CD set are mostly drawn from the 1950s and early 1960s - largely a mixture of standards from the pens of classic songwriters like Cole Porter and George Gershwin, as well as showtunes taken from musicals like My Fair Lady and Showboat.

Ex-husband Andrew Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Records can be accused of scraping the bottom of the barrel in its second compilation of old Sarah Brightman tracks released to take advantage of the singer's international popularity due to her albums Time to Say Goodbye, Eden, and La Luna, all recorded for a different company. Happily, even the bottom of the barrel contains some excellent material, even after the cream was skimmed off with The Andrew Lloyd Webber Collection. During and after her marriage to Lloyd Webber, Brightman performed on the Original London Cast recording of The Phantom of the Opera and recorded the albums The Songs That Got Away (1989) and Surrender (1995), and that's the material sampled here, that is, the remaining tracks that weren't used on The Andrew Lloyd Webber Collection.