EMI's Best Romantic Classics 100 may fulfill some listeners' needs by providing the most familiar excerpts and short pieces of nineteenth and twentieth century "mood" music, but it is unsatisfying in several other aspects. First, anyone who wants complete works will be annoyed by the rather large number of extracted sections, which in most cases amount to little more than four or five minutes of the best-known thematic passages, culled from famous concertos, symphonies, sonatas, ballets, and operas that are much, much ...
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EMI's Best Romantic Classics 100 may fulfill some listeners' needs by providing the most familiar excerpts and short pieces of nineteenth and twentieth century "mood" music, but it is unsatisfying in several other aspects. First, anyone who wants complete works will be annoyed by the rather large number of extracted sections, which in most cases amount to little more than four or five minutes of the best-known thematic passages, culled from famous concertos, symphonies, sonatas, ballets, and operas that are much, much longer. While it is expected that only brief examples could be included in a six-disc collection of 100 tracks, it would have been preferable to have complete miniatures instead of token snippets. Second, the sound of the recordings varies substantially, depending on the session dates, venues, instrumentation, and recording technology, so the sonic depth, dynamics, textures, and timbres of the music can be quite realistic and brilliant on one track and dull and unimpressive on the next --...
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