Opera Babes, Beyond Imagination - 1h 3m 44s

Tracks & Durations

1. One Fine Day	3:01
2. Sempre Ricordo (From the Piano Concerto)	5:24
3. There's a Place (From the New World...)	4:38
4. Beyond Imagination (From a Midsummer...)	5:05
5. O Fortuna (From Carnina Burana)	2:55
6. Lakme H2O	4:05
7. Ebben?...Ne Andro Lontano (From the Opera...)	3:41
8. You Lilve on in My Heart	3:54
9. Chanson Boheme (From the Opera Carmen)	4:25
10. Remember Me	3:34
11. Stranger in Paradise (From the Musical...)	4:22
12. Ode LL Joy (From Symphony No. 9)	3:47
13. 1001 Nights (From the Nutcracker Suite)	3:03
14. Barcarolle (From the Opera the Tales of...)	2:45
15. Lakme H2O (Vibe Tribe Mix)	2:52
16. Vittorial! (Aida 2002) (From the Opera...)	5:55
17. CDPlus	0:07

Note: The information about this album is acquired from the publicly available resources and we are not responsible for their accuracy.

Review

Plucked from a wet afternoon of busking Bizet and Puccini to passersby on the Piazza in Covent Garden in the spring of 2001, soprano Rebecca Knight and mezzo Karen England soon found themselves singing in slightly larger venues: the FA Cup and Champions League soccer finals. That the management company doing the plucking had recently performed a similar Cinderella crossover act for Russell Watson offered portent, and indeed the Babes--the moniker began as a joke--were soon on their way to this recording debut. The marketing shtick and its soccer connections may offend purists, but it's the football hooligans that the Babes are trying to win over here; can Borodin soothe the savage Manchester United fan? Their classically trained voices mesh gloriously, with England's warm mezzo showing particular character in her solo turns.

The repertoire choices here cover material that may already be familiar to fans of Charlotte Church (i.e., Delibes "Flower Duet") and other crossover acts, but they do include some pleasant surprises, like Offenbach's Barcarolle from The Tales of Hoffmann and "You Live On in My Heart," a reworking of Ennio Morricone's enchanting Cinema Paradiso theme with lyrics by Knight. But in a rush toward the musical middle of the road, it's the productions themselves that sometimes overwhelm the Babes with bathos ("Ave Maria"), hollow thunder ("Aida 2002"), and electro club kitsch (the 'Vibe Tribe' mix of "Flower Duet"). Former Art of Noise mainstay Anne Dudley's tastefully restrained coloring of Tchaikovsky's "1001 Nights" is one of the notable exceptions. They're babes, they sing opera--with fair promise--for the masses, and if they turn one in a hundred from football hooliganism to a well-mannered appreciation of Grieg and Dvorák, won't it all have been worth it? --Jerry McCulley

Other Versions

Albums are mined from the various public resources and can be actually the same but different in the tracks length only. We are keeping all versions now.

Beyond Imagination

Tracks: 16 (-1 tracks), Disk length: 60m 42s (-4m 58s)

Beyond Imagination

Tracks: 15 (-2 tracks), Disk length: 57m 17s (-7m 33s)

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