Nige
Group: Members
Posts: 26
Joined: Sep. 2007 |
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Posted: Sep. 09 2007, 06:52 |
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Sorry to be negative but I fear there may be something missing from this! I think we all agree that Mike Oldfield is a great composer and musician. There is a uniqueness in his music driven, in part, by the fact that he has not needed to rely on other musicians to interpret his work in the past – whether we’re listening to guitar, bass, keyboards or any other instrument, it’s usually easy to spot that it’s Oldfield playing. When everything is added together, we’re usually treated to something quite special.
However, compare The Orchestral Tubular Bells to the original! Whilst I don’t think the general recording quality and instrumentation of the former is particularly good, it also suffers from a lack of Oldfield and I think that most of us would agree that there’s no comparison.
I hope this album is good but, to use an analogy, I fear that it may have a similar effect to Picasso leading a group of artists in a painting by numbers session – he could have drawn the outline, planned the colours and done some of the painting; it would probably be a reasonable piece of art but almost certainly nowhere near as good as a piece of work he completed on his own.
I applaud Mr Oldfield for trying something genuinely new but will this be an album I will play on a regular basis as I still do with the original 3 and some of the others? Based on the previews I have heard, probably not.
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