Dead in The Water Campbell

This box set is the ultimate pop collection, 43 albums featuring many of the biggest hits performed on the legendary pop music chart BBC TV programme Top of the Pops, which ran for a record shattering 42 years from January 1964 to July 2006! The show totalled an amazing 2205 episodes and at its peak attracted 15 million viewers per week! This complete set features a total of 875 tracks, including over 600 top ten hits and over 150 number one's!

Artaxerxes, premiered in London in 1762, was the first full-length opera seria sung in English. It proved a great success and helped to revive the fortunes of Thomas Arne, whose career had been in the doldrums. The opera featured his new protégée and mistress Charlotte Brent in the role of Mandane and Arne lavished attention on her music. Mandane’s arias and those of the hero Arbaces provide many of the opera’s high points, with their rich orchestrations, virtuoso vocal parts and captivating tunes. Though based on the Handelian model, Artaxerxes shows both Arne’s talent at the later galant style and his penchant for folk-like, pastoral airs. The results are mostly a delight (if a tad lightweight for the libretto’s blood ’n’ thunder deeds), with a variety of attractive arias further enhanced by Arne’s deft use of woodwind. Christopher Robson in the title role and Catherine Bott, thrilling as Mandane, head a fine team of singers: my only complaint is that Patricia Spence’s forceful Arbaces too often slips into shrill and strident mode.

Sounds of the Seventies was a 40-volume series issued by Time-Life during the late 1980s and early-to-mid 1990s, spotlighting pop music of the 1970s. Much like Time-Life's other series chronicling popular music, volumes in the "Sounds of the Seventies" series covered a specific time period, including individual years in some volumes, and different parts of the decade (for instance, the early 1970s) in others; in addition, some volumes covered specific trends, such as music popular on album-oriented rock stations on the FM band.

This box set is the ultimate pop collection, 43 albums featuring many of the biggest hits performed on the legendary pop music chart BBC TV programme Top of the Pops, which ran for a record shattering 42 years from January 1964 to July 2006! The show totalled an amazing 2205 episodes and at its peak attracted 15 million viewers per week! This complete set features a total of 875 tracks, including over 600 top ten hits and over 150 number one's!