Title: Fantastic singing by Christoff, appalling package by EMI.
Product review: "As important to Christoff as the music was the text" so says Alan Blyth in the booklet to this 5CD set.A shame then it was not so important to EMI France. Are we to assume that the original releases in 1963 and 1969 lacked texts, translations and decent notes? Well perhaps that was possible then, but that doesn't mean that today a major record company should be able to get away with 3 pages each of French, English and German notes and a listing of song titles in French only.It isn't as if EMI France can't do it, because they already did for Christoff's 3CD Mussorgsky set - even providing the Russian texts in Cyrillic, something still rare despite the example of Philips' Kirov sets.No doubt diehard Christoff fans will put up with EMI France for the sake of the music, but if you are just browsing then search for the Mussorgsky set on Amazon and you will soon be the happy owner of one of Gramophone Magazine's top 100 recordings of all time.
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