Close encounters of the discount kind


A close encounter of the discount kind in HMV's Oxford Street store leads the path back to Convivencia, the CD of music from Moorish Spain seen above. (That artwork incidentally is on my shortlist of best cover art of all time). In November 2006 I wrote an article contrasting Convivencia, which features soprano Catherine Bott accompanied by various permutations of lute, vihuela, guitar, oud, tar, tablah, tbilat and douf, with a new CD of Dowland lute songs performed by rock star Sting. Recently I noticed the Deutsche Grammophon Sting CD in a deletions bin in HMV Oxford Street. So I checked with Chris Marr at leading independent retailer Prelude Records (how many online retailers have an up-and-coming composer on their staff?) for an update. He told me the original CD of Sting's Songs from the Labyrinth was deleted last autumn. There is now a 'Special Edition' CD released in November 2008 which has a three extra tracks. And there is a 2 CD edition consisting of the CD, a bonus disc of some live performances and also a DVD of Sting talking about why he recorded them and the background to the project. Confused? Well, so is amazon.co.uk. Meanwhile Convivencia sails serenely on in its original release format. Read my original post about different approaches to the lute here.

Convivencia was bought from Prelude Records. I'm afraid i haven't bought the Sting CD. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

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