TREASURE CHEST VOLUME 3 - THE MISSING HALF

A typical collectors' item, with it's two stars don't rating the music quality, but expressing the historic value. According to the booklet, on January 18th 1974, Rick Wakeman hold two shows at the Royal Festival Hall, and those were his first solo concerts, performing new piece of music inspired by Jules Verne's "Journey to the Centre of the Earth". The "Journey" from the second show was taped, soon issued and sold in more then ten millions copies until present times. But it was unknown (to the most of us) that the first part of the second show was taped also, "to check if recording equipment was working correctly". The first part, or "the first half", through time became "the lost half", but fortunately was found, so the title of this CD, "the missing half".

Of 53 minutes on CD, about 35 minutes are from the second show. Very interesting and good versions of "Catherine Parr", "Catherine Howard" and "Anne Boleyn", and encore "The pearl and dean piano concerto", are the most valuable tracks, all together making "the good half" of CD. "A road to ruin" is, if I clearly understood Rick Wakeman's introduction, music composed to the short film inspired by the same Jules Verne novel, and is some humorous honky tonk vaudeville piano (or cembalo) piece, while "Twelfth street rag" is similarly played cover of traditional music. The David Hemmings "voice collection" is a non-music piece made for fun on spoken introductions in "Journey", more suitable for some TV reportage or DVD medium rather then audio CD, and "King Arthur" and "Guinevere" are "early mixes prior to the final orchestration and choir additives, with rough vocals", presenting the transitional stage in making of following record.

To buy or not to buy, that is the question! Maybe the best choice is to wait for some kind of "the both halves" issue. The time will tell.