Venus in Fur

Classical Moods is a four-disc collection of short pieces of classical music put together with the thought of soothing listeners with nice melodies. The collection has all the big names, like Mozart, Debussy, Bach, Gershwin, and Rachmaninov, and their big hits, like "Swan Lake," "Clair de Lune," "The William Tell Overture," "Sabre Dance," and "Rhapsody in Blue." Each disc contains a great deal of music, as many of the pieces are excerpts and movements taken from larger works. The set may be a nice starting point for a new fan of classical, as all the great melodies are here and presented on a platter for easy consumption. More sophisticated fans of the music won't have much use for it.

It is usually the big nineteenth-century opera sets that are bought for their singers; but with a line-up of principals such as we have here Handel too is swept into the golden net. Lucia Popp, two years into her career after her Vienna debut, Christa Ludwig, Fritz Wunderlich, Walter Berry: that is a quartet which in its time may have seemed no more than standard stuff, but at this date looks starry indeed. […] The Orfeo, for one thing, is sung in German instead of Italian; it has cuts, though many fewer than the Mackerras recording in English with Dame Janet Baker; it has the solo voices recorded very close indeed (those that are supposedly off-stage are just about where many modern recordings would have them except when off-stage); and the orchestra sounds, to our re-trained ears, big and thick, with the heavy bass-line that used to seem as proper to Handel as gravy from the roast was to Yorkshire pudding.