cd Critique^TM

Barbara Cook is one of today's most accomplished song stylists, and if you don't believe us, just listen to this live album. It's a master class in the art of singing. It documents an evening at Carnegie Hall during which Cook proved that she can dissect and extract the substance ...

At the beginning of this two-disc CD, recorded live at England's Sydmonton Festival, the Narrator (a droll Stephen Fry) welcomes the audience "to the 40th-anniversary performance and yet world premiere" of The Likes of Us. The show was the first collaboration between composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyricist Tim Rice, ...

Though Puccini's trilogy of one-act operas, Il Trittico, is hard to love in its totality, Suor Angelica shows the composer retreating from melodramatic verismo into a more lyrical expression, as befits this story of a nun driven to suicide when told her child is dead. Though this cast ...

This may not be the most sophisticated opera undertaking of the decade, but it's one of the loveliest. There are precious few operas which really appeal to children--I've never seen a child sit through Hansel and Gretel without fidgeting--but this one is magical. Composer Rachel Portman is well-known and respected ...

Tweens aren't often heralded for their good judgment and excellent taste (Heelys--hello), but if any young starlet can redeem them, it's Hannah Montana. On this, the second soundtrack from the Disney Channel series, Miley Cyrus takes her cues from her TV alter ego, who has an alter ego of her ...

If the 9-year-old in your life hasn't alerted you already, consider this your heads up: Not since Hilary Duff has Disney delivered the masses a tween sensation as hot as the double-life-leading Miss Hannah Montana. More important for speaker-blowing second- to seventh-graders and the parents forced to buy them CDs, ...

The Hannah Montana special edition soundtrack arrives so coolly p ackaged and with such a bonanza of extras that it might even induce budget-conscious tweens who already own the original to break open their piggy banks a second time. All the same hyper-charged, deliriously fun songs are here--the Radio Disney ...

If the 9-year-old in your life hasn't alerted you already, consider this your heads up: Not since Hilary Duff has Disney delivered the masses a tween sensation as hot as the double-life-leading Miss Hannah Montana. More important for speaker-blowing second- to seventh-graders and the parents forced to buy them CDs, ...

Fans of High School Musical can breathe easy: Based on this soundtrack, the sequel is just as good, and perhaps even better. Though its trailer asked "Are you ready for the start of something new?" HSM2 isn't turning the franchise into The Wire, and really is more of the same--which ...

Barbara Cook's Broadway doesn't actually document this magnificent singer's engagement on the Great White Way, but instead a Lincoln Center show compiling her favorite musical-theater tunes. Cook includes material from two of her signature shows: "Till There Was You" from The Music Man and a superb four-song suite from She ...

Being the famous 14-year old rock star Hannah Montana isn't easy, nor is the life of an average Los Angeles middle school student who's trying to figure out her place in the social scene. Imagine, then, how difficult Disney Channel's Miley Stewart's life is considering she's living both lives ...

The hot girl rock group The Cheetah Girls is about to discover just how important dreams and true friendship are as they head to Barcelona for an exciting summer vacation. When Chanel's (Adrienne Bailon) mother announces a trip to Barcelona to meet her current boyfriend's family, Chanel is distraught ...

Don Henley and the Eagles may have sold a jillion albums, written some memorable songs, and established themselves as icons of the cocaine-colored '70s. But if there's one thing they weren't, it's a great live band--unless, of course, your idea of greatness includes rote, note-perfect re-creations of the recorded versions. ...

The long-defunct, Southern California band regrouped for an album, an expensive tour (expensive for ticket buyers, that is), and this televised special, which features the Eagles in performance. Laid-back but sharp and even stirring during a longish acoustic set, the guys quickly get past the nostalgia element and sound truly ...

Thirty songs, spread out over two discs and well over two and a half hours, with fine performances, great sound, and good visual direction: it's all here on Farewell 1 Tour, a documentary of the Eagles' 2004 concert in Melbourne, Australia. At one point, the veteran band seemed unlikely to ...

The critical debate over Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical legacy will no doubt rage for decades. Is he the shrewd populist composer who almost single-handedly revived the moribund stage musical--or a crass, Barnum-esque showman (who almost single-handedly revived the moribund stage musical)? This 18-track anthology chronicles the high points of Sir ...

Sarah Brightman's career was launched by her success in Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera, so it's no surprise to hear the soprano paying homage to the composer on this disc. Really a Brightman best-of, the album includes the Phantom theme (a duet with Michael Crawford), the light-opera fare ...

The most surprising track on this collection isn't hidden between blockbusters selections from the blockbuster Lloyd Webber songbook but is located in plain view right at the beginning of the CD. The previously unreleased "Probably on Thursday" was originally written as a pop song in 1967 and indeed sounds very ...

Fans of small, pretty-voiced soprano Sarah Brightman will not be disappointed by this CD. In addition to some pop songs, Brightman sings high-flying excerpts from Orff's Carmina Burana, Puccini's "O mio babbino caro" (performed better by almost any other operatic soprano elsewhere), and "Alleluia" from Mozart's Exsultate Jubilate. One might ...

Have some friends who still haven't discovered what the Sarah Brightman fuss is all about? You'll find the perfect introduction to make converts of them all in Classics, so they'll have no more excuses to remain clueless. Sporting a Botticelli-inspired image of the platinum-selling soprano on the cover, Classics is ...

In this follow-up to the smashing success of her 1997 CD Time to Say Goodbye, Sarah Brightman continues down the primrose crossover path, blithely gliding from covers of Hooverphonic (the title track) and Kansas ("Dust in the Wind") to Puccini and film scores (Titanic and The English Patient). Sometimes, as ...

Superstar crossover vocalist Sarah Brightman greets the new millennium with an even surer, bolder sense of her unique musical niche than that evident from 1999's Eden. Like Eden, La Luna is a concept album only in a vaguely free-associative sense. The selection of material here touches on images of the ...

If one's notion of "world music" promises a touch of the exotic and indigenous, often overlooked is the fact that the influence of western pop music has seeped into every corner of the globe, creating a hybrid that's often more than merely the sum of its influences. Theater vet Brightman ...

This disc is obviously aimed at the world-music audience, if one judges from its title and the subtitle, "Folk-Inspired Music for Guitar." But that shouldn't dissuade listeners interested in more serious music. Isbin has collected original pieces and arrangements from Spain, Latin America, Appalachia, Ireland, Israel, and Greece--all of them ...

The predictably classy Tony Bennett Sings the Ultimate American Songbook, Vol. 1 might trip you up if you're not an on-the-ball kind of fan: Unlike 2006's Duets: An American Classic and other recent Bennett projects that reached into the past for material but showcased his still mighty modern vocal prowess, ...