Queen Montreal

Essentially, the 2007 release Queen Rock Montreal is the long-delayed official release of the soundtrack to the We Will Rock You concert video, capturing highlights from the group's two-night stand at the Montreal Forum on November 24 and 25, 1981. This double-disc contains the full set, including the previously unreleased "Flash" and "The Hero," and it benefits from the ebb and flow of a full concert, giving a broader, fuller sense of Queen at the peak of their power, which they were close to being at the time this was recorded…

This collection puts some of the best Purcell on display–and it couldn't have a more musical or vocally accomplished advocate than Canadian soprano Karina Gauvin. Her voice is pretty for sure, but it also has richness and substance, not to mention a most endearing vibrato that adds an earnestness and enlivening tension to everything she sings.

While writing and recording The Game, Queen were asked by renowned movie director Dino DeLaurentis to provide the soundtrack for his upcoming sci-fi epic Flash Gordon. The band accepted and promptly began working on both albums simultaneously. Although at first many fans criticized Flash Gordon since it was issued as an official Queen release rather than a motion picture soundtrack, it has proven to be one of rock's better motion picture soundtracks over the years…

Journey is a compilation of greatest hits from CDs of Les Boréades de Montréal, an early music ensemble that focuses on music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was probably compiled as a promotional teaser, to tantalize listeners into going out and buying the albums from which these excerpts were extracted, and if that was the intent it ought to be entirely successful. The performers play with infectious verve and with a lilt that comes close to being a swing. The pieces from the earlier to mid-Baroque, by Purcell and Cavalli, come to life with a special energy. The excerpts from Cavalli's opera La Calisto, which include transcriptions of vocal pieces, are especially entertaining, and even without words the music conveys a sense of wild hilarity.

The Game Tour was a concert tour by the British rock band Queen to support their successful 1980 album The Game. This tour featured the first performances in South America by the group. In Buenos Aires, Queen drew a crowd of 300,000—the largest single concert crowd in Argentine history as of 1982. In São Paulo, Brazil, the attendance was 131,000 and 120,000 on two consecutive nights.

Another feather in the Dutoit/Montreal/Decca cap, not least for the sound engineers' achievement in so brilliantly capturing the mammoth sonorities of the Symphonie funebre et triomphale (whose first performance Berlioz conducted walking backwards at the head of his huge wind-and-percussion band, though—alas for the legend!—with a baton, not a sword). For concert hall, rather than open air performance he later added strings and a chorus, and it is this version that is adopted here (as it was in Colin Davis's 1969 Philips recording). Splendid as that issue was, this new one even surpasses it in clarity and impact, with its majestic brass chords and a chorus that adds incisively to the final climax.

Queen had long been one of the biggest bands in the world by 1980's The Game, but this album was the first time they made a glossy, unabashed pop album, one that was designed to sound exactly like its time…

Famously tagged as "fascist" in a Rolling Stone review printed at the time of its 1978 release, Jazz does indeed showcase a band that does thrive upon its power, thrilling upon the hold that it has on its audience. That confidence, that self-intoxication, was hinted at on News of the World but it takes full flower here, and that assurance acts as a cohesive device, turning this into one of Queen's sleekest albums…

Super deluxe edition of "News Of The World" from Queen consists of 3 CDs, a DVD, and a LP. Disc 1 (original album) includes "All Dead, All Dead" featuring Freddie Mercury on vocal. *The original album version features Brian May. Disc 2 (raw sessions) consists of alternate takes, demo ones, and rough mix versions, including "We Are The Champions" with entirely different rendition and vocal from the previous recordings…