Peak Poker Performance

Two live recordings featuring Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac have been found and are being released officially on CD and vinyl as Before The Beginning 1968-1970. The recently discovered recordings date from 1968 and 1970 and were discovered unlabelled in the US, so not much is known about them other than they have been authenticated by experts and approved for release by Fleetwood Mac.

Description: On August 18, 1990, WHITESNAKE headlined the legendary Monsters Of Rock (now known as 'Download') festival in Castle Donnington, England. WHITESNAKE's performance at the festival was one of the highlights of the Liquor & Poker World Tour, which saw over a million people attend the band's sold-out concerts. The previously unreleased footage shows one of WHITESNAKE's most intense lineup performing in front of an audience of over 70,000. The audio recording of the concert is mixed in 5.1 and stereo formats, so it can only be cooler than attending the event directly. The 1990 WHITESNAKE line-up included guitar greats Steve Vai and Adrian Vandenberg, bassist Rudy Sarzo,
The "Live At Donington 1990" DVD also includes an impressive gallery of previously unseen photos of the band from the "Liquor & Poker" tour, as well as a documentary on the making of the "Slip Of The Tongue" album.

Judging simply by timings, Mintz and Sinopoli seem to have decided on a middle path in their approach to the first movement of this concerto: they take nearly a minute less over it than Mutter and Karajan (also on DG), about a minute and a half more than Perlman and Giulini on EMI. Using ears rather than a stopwatch, however, they seem to be giving by far the slowest performance of the movement that I have heard in years. It is a reading from which anything which might savour of soloistic display has been expunged, in which no note, even one of a flourish of semiquavers, is allowed to be 'merely' decorative. Mutter is fond of polishing every note like a jewel, too, but the very opening of the concerto in hers and Karajan's reading sounds positively sprightly set beside the newcomer. The moment Mutter enters the speed slackens markedly, but Karajan watchfully assures that the pulse returns with each tutti, and a sense of momentum is present throughout, even during the soloist's most wayward rhapsodizings.