3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
SUPERB ACCURATE AND DRAMATIC PERFORMANCE, May 14 2008
By Jesse Knight - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Christmas Oratorio (Audio CD)
All four soloists are top notch, singing accurately and with exceptional expression. They sound great in the solos, and blend beautifully together. The Choir and orchestra are no less exciting. Tempo is fast, similar to Gardiner's many bach recordings. Sound in CD mode is as good as it gets. I do not have a SACD player, so I cannot comment on the 5.1 channel sound option. This hybrid disc played fine on three different conventional CD and DVD players.
The two discs are part of a book that is not the same size as any recorded media I have. Thus it will not fit standard cases. For me this is not a problem, as I keep it with my books. Others who insist on having everything a to z may rebel.
I found reading the text out of this book much easier than reading a CD booklet. The print is larger.
Unfortunately there are no track numbers, only Roman numeral listing of sections. The trouble starts at XXXV, (35) which is track 35, so far so good. XXXVb however is track 36, which is the last track on CD 1.
CD 2 track 1 is of course XXXVI (36) Track 2 is XXXVII (37) of course.
Rather than try to subtract 35 from each Roman numeral to get the track numbers for the second CD, I wrote them in, in pencil.
All in all, having the book, even with this flaw, is far better than typical CD booklets.