MAGNIFICATION

The album "Magnification" is before everything else a work of art of a rock-band with a classical orchestra. In the past there are many examples of it (Deep Purple, Zappa, Porcupine, The Beatles,..). Very often I had mixed feelings about the result because most of the time the orchestral arrngements were pretty flat. And most of the time the band with the singer is too loud in the balance. This is always a great problem for the engineers to get a nice result with so many different players with electric and acoustic instruments.

In the "Magnification" album there are nice orchestral arrangements that makes this album what I should call the classical one. The balance between the electric and the acoustic instruments is well done. Sometimes the woodwind is too silent for me and is the orchestra recorded too general. But never you get the feeling that one of the two groups are more important than the other one. As always there are the strong melodies of Anderson on the lyrics written in a very natural way.Strong pieces are "Magnification", "Give love each day", "Dreamtime" and the symfonie "In The Presence Of".

B.T.W. has anybody heard the bassoonsolo in the beginning of the title song "Magnification"?