Last Night of the Millennium - one to avoid.....

[Dave Payn]

I picked this up cheaply (thank heavens!) a few weeks ago and it consists of two CDs, one called Music for a Millennium and the other called Music for a Millennium 2, the performers being the English Brass Consort and the organists Neil Taylor (disc 1) and Kevin Bowyer (disc 2) in two discs worth of patriotic English music

Now it's not that individually the brass play badly (though there are a few iffy moments) or the organist plays badly, but for whatever reason, there are several moments on disc 1 particularly, where the recording engineers should have just shouted 'whoa there, brass and organ are about a semitone out, can we do that again!'. Maybe there wasn't enough time, who knows, but the result is at times exceedingly painful to the ears.

Disc 2 is an improvement all round, thankfully, but disc 1 amazingly, was voted Record of the Year 1999 by Classic FM magazine!

p.s. Sorry to go all linguistic again, but I spell 'Millennium as it is shown on the disc cover. Isn't it spelt 'Milennium'? Not that it really matters.....

Sorry to post a thoroughly disparaging review but they can't all be award winners! (Hang on, what am I saying? This IS an award winner!)

 

[PeterBale]

I also picked this one up some time ago - very cheaply, about £1.99 if I remember :shock: - and agree it is very much a mixed bag. The same shop had copies of volume 1 at almost full price, and I was glad I hadn't forked out that much :!:

As for the spelling of "Milennium", I believe that is the standard spelling, but it was decided to adopt the double "l" when they were marking the year 2000.

Was the award voted for by the readers of the magazine or its critics? If the former, they may well only have heard a few tracks when it was broadcast, and they may well not have heard much brass ensemble work before.

 

[Dave Payn]

I also picked this one up some time ago - very cheaply, about £1.99 if I remember :shock: - and agree it is very much a mixed bag. The same shop had copies of volume 1 at almost full price, and I was glad I hadn't forked out that much :!:

As for the spelling of "Milennium", I believe that is the standard spelling, but it was decided to adopt the double "l" when they were marking the year 2000.

Was the award voted for by the readers of the magazine or its critics? If the former, they may well only have heard a few tracks when it was broadcast, and they may well not have heard much brass ensemble work before.

I don't know, but I guess it was the 'critics'. Maybe they'd heard a contemporary piece of music once and decided that semitone clashes were the norm..... ;-) :lol:

 

[MoominDave]

"Millennium" - the CD is right, and our fine tMP reference team of Payn & Bale is wrong, for once. The single 'l' is a very common misspelling, though.

To convince yourself, try, for example, searching on www.dictionary.com.

 

[PeterBale]

Yup - sorry about that, I got it the wrong way round, in that it was the Milennium Dome that adopted the single "l" spelling

 

[Dave Payn]

"Millennium" - the CD is right, and our fine tMP reference team of Payn & Bale is wrong, for once. The single 'l' is a very common misspelling, though.

To convince yourself, try, for example, searching on www.dictionary.com.

Nah, I usually get it wrong anyway! ;-) :lol: You don't want to start speling like wot I kan! ;-)