performance, himself a boy wonder too, entrancing a fashionable audience, and earning a good fee for his delighted and ambitious father.
The small instrumental ensemble and the strange quality of boys' voices make for a pleasing combined effect. The DVD leaves you pondering anew the old question of why it is boys rather than girls who have these evocative vocal tones prior to puberty. Mozarteans in particular will be keen to collect these rarely performed early works.
Andre Rieu is at it again, plugging away at over-familiar old favorites and trying to find ways to make them new. This time in Love Around the World, it's seemingly on board a German ocean liner on a round-the-globe trip. Rieu plays away on his violin, a massed choir soars in the background, and ever-adoring fans purportedly laugh, love and applaud. It's easy listening, sweet music, call it what you will, all colored by Rieu's agreeable personality.
An added zest and high spirits is part of the recipe, and that too predictably arrives. It's hardly classical music. Some sections are virtually indistinguishable from travel publicity (it's always summer with Andre Rieu), while others resemble an old-folks' party. But huge numbers of people enjoy these Europe-centered shows, and that can't be a bad thing. However, Rieu's earlier Romantic Paradise (reviewed in the Taipei Times on Feb. 29, 2004) was far more infectiously exhilarating, as well as being a good deal longer. And it has to be said that one track, any track, of Stephane Grappelli, an infinitely greater popular violinist, is worth any number of Andre Rieu DVDs.
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