Beatles Love CD

Love is the title of the highly successful Cirque du Soleil show featuring the music of the Beatles, currently wowing audiences in Las Vegas. The music for the show, reworked by Sir George Martin and his son Giles, is a continuous soundscape of well-known songs by the Beatles augmented by additional instrumentation and vocals taken from their vast bank of original multi-track tapes. The result is an amazing set reinforcing the timeless quality of the group's recordings destined to open up a new legion of fans to the Beatles experience. The CD includes newly mixed and mastered music plus a 28 page booklet. The audio DVD contains 82 minutes of music both in 5.1 surround sound and

The Beatles: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, George Harrison.
Given his unparalleled talent for innovative recording, mixing, and soundscaping, producer Sir George Martin has always been rightly referred to as "the fifth Beatle." Some 35 years after the Beatles disbanded, Martin was still shaping the group's music, as demonstrated by the 2006 release LOVE. The album (created to coincide with a Cirque du Soleil performance based on Beatles songs) amounts to a musical fantasia centered on the Beatles' output, with famous work from both early and late in the band's career collaged with great care and artistry.
Martin's relationship to the band gives him a unique perspective (not to mention access to a vast catalogue of multi-track tapes), which results in a shape-shifting overview that encompasses demo recordings, instrumental passages, and snippets from some of the best-loved Beatles tunes. Beatles fanatics will be in seventh heaven playing "name that reference" on this sonic carpet ride, but LOVE also provides something of an "overture" to the Beatles' oeuvre. The SPECIAL EDITION comes with a bonus audio-only DVD featuring the album in various stereo mixes.
If boiled down to a simple synopsis, the Beatles' LOVE sounds radical: assisted by his father, the legendary Beatles producer George, Giles Martin has assembled a remix album where familiar Fab Four tunes aren't just refurbished, they're given the mash-up treatment, meaning different versions of different songs are pasted together to create a new track. Ever since the turn of the century, mash-ups were in vogue in the underground, as such cut-n-paste jobs as Freelance Hellraiser's "Stroke of Genius" -- which paired up the Strokes' "Last Night" with Christina Aguilera's "Genie in a Bottle" -- circulated on the net, but no major group issued their own mash-up mastermix until LOVE in November 2006. Put in those terms, it seems like LOVE is a grand experiment, a piece of art for art's sake, but that's hardly the case. Its genesis lies with the Beatles agreeing to collaborate with performance dance troupe Cirque du Soleil on a project that evolved into the Las Vegas stage show LOVE, an extravaganza that cost well over 100 million dollars and was designed to generate revenue far exceeding that. During pre-production, all involved realized that the original Beatles tapes needed to be remastered in order to sound impressive by modern standards when pumped through the huge new theater -- the theater made just with this dance revue in mind -- and since they needed to be tweaked, they might as well use the opportunity to do something different with the familiar music, too: to remix and re-imagine it, to make LOVE be something unique to both the Beatles and Cirque du Soleil.
Keep in mind the Cirque du Soleil portion of the equation: George and Giles Martin may have been given free reign to recontextualize the Beatles' catalog, but given that this was for a project that cost hundreds of millions of dollars this wasn't quite the second coming of The Grey Album, where Danger Mouse surreptitiously mashed up The White Album with Jay-Z's The Black Album. This isn't an art project and it isn't underground, either: it's a big, splashy commercial endeavor, one that needs to surprise millions ofRolling Stone - 3.5 stars out of 5 -- "[I]t's LOVEly -- the suite side of ABBEY ROAD extended to seventy-eight minutes."
Entertainment Weekly (p.105) - "[I]t's bliss....The exhilarating opener, 'Because,' is now a cappella, and the most glorious choral rock divinity since the Beach Boys' 'Our Prayer'..." -- Grade: A
Q (p.133) - 4 stars out of 5 -- "[T]his demands the listener to reappraise The Beatles' brilliance with fresh ears. A genuine revolution in the head."
Q (p.118) - Ranked #53 in Q Magazine's "100 Greatest Albums of 2006."
Mojo (Publisher) (p.100) - 5 stars out of 5 -- "Stunning....You'll marvel at the sound and the new insight it brings to music you know so well."