RENDEZ-VOUS

Originally composed as a tie-in with the Challenger shuttle mission before, Jean-Michel Jarre's Rendez-vous is a piece whose backstory ends up with a little extra poignancy due to the disaster which claimed the lives of the astronauts. Overall it's a long piece reminiscent of Jarre's breakthroughs like Oxygene and Equinoxe, the vocal experiments of Zoolook having been set aside. Aside from the last piece being subtitled "Ron's Piece", in light of the fact that astronaut Ron McNair was supposed to play the sax part of it from orbit as part of the mission, the mood of the whole seems rather untroubled by the tragedy it was associated with, and if I had any major criticism it would be the apparent lack of strong emotion altogether.