I bought a CD!
How long has it been?
In a world where music streaming is becoming more dominant, (sales up 50{455065614084d52a52b6503b0dd540273011d0059da42457a63ab2d05f0df802} in 2016 to £251m), I rarely venture into a music shop or even purchase CDs on-line. I know people who don’t own a CD player anymore.
Sales of CDs may be declining, but at a slowing pace, which surprised me. Vinyl sales are still rising, so there is hope that streaming won’t condemn music shops to the grave.
I had a rare visit to HMV and this CD caught my eye. It’s a compilation of instrumental piano pieces – some classics and some modern. I didn’t hesitate too much and it’s a nice cd to have in your collection. There are 48 songs included lasting over 3 ½ hours.
Peaceful Piano is put together by DECCA and includes music from “The Music Lab Collective”. I hadn’t heard of them before and I can’t find much information about them.
Here’s a link to their Facebook page.
https://www.facebook.com/MusicLabCollective
They “champion contemporary classical music”. I found some earlier examples of their pieces from various players and some have been included on the Peaceful Piano CD.
The CD includes various instrumentals of film music – “A thousand Years” from Twilight, “Beauty & the Beast”, “Truman Sleeps”, “Any other name” from American Beauty
Other instrumentals include Lukas Graham’s “7 Years” and Adele’s “Hello” and Mike Posner’s “I took a pill in Ibiza”, Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of you” and Coldplay’s “Fix you”. These are all very good versions, not the tacky instrumentals you may here as background music in a DIY store!
Rick Wakeman has allowed his version of “Life on Mars” – well worth a listen if you haven’t heard this new arrangement as his Piano Portraits CD. He played on the original Bowie track of course.
There are two Ludovico Einaudi tracks included – “Nuvole Bianche” and “I Giorni” which are staples. Difficult to choose from his wealth of good songs.
Familiar older classics appear on the CD – “Claire de Lune” (played by Pascal Rogé), “Moonlight Sonata” (Vladimir Ashkenazy) “Gymnopedies” (Rogé) Debussy’s “Prelude, Book1, L117: No.8” (Nelson Freire), Chopin’s “Preludes, Op.28: No 15” (Ashkenazy) to name several. There are other pieces from Mozart, Pachelbel, Beethoven and Ravel.
I’ve mentioned elsewhere on the site here, that it’s always good to find music that is not familiar to you and there is plenty here for me in that respect. I particularly liked “Portrait Gallery” by Luke Howard. It’s very haunting and he’s an excellent pianist. I’ve since listened to a few of his other songs, so this is a big plus to me discovering something new. He’s well worth investigating…..http://www.lukehoward.com/about/
To summarise this is a great value CD with some classical standards that are good to have on one collection. Some nice instrumentals of film and pop songs also gives the CD a different take than just a classical greatest hits. It’s a great, good value CD to have in your collection. Dust off that CD player!
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