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March 26, 2006  I've finally gotten around to listening to Yo-Yo Ma Plays Ennio Morricone, a wonderful CD that Sony Classical released a little over a year ago. Ennio is the composer of a million incredible film scores, including all the groundbreaking music for the Sergio Leone westerns of the 60s like A Fistful of Dollars and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. He is also known for his uniquely stylish elegiac mode, which includes soaring themes like "Gabriel's Oboe" from The Mission and the theme from Once Upon a Time in the West. This CD is not just an album of Yo-Yo Ma covering Ennio themes; rather, Ennio re-orchestrated and conducted his own pieces with an orchestra in Rome. The result is that the music retains its orchestral texture and sonic character, and now features breathtakingly gorgeous cello solos. Highlights include the aforementioned pieces as well as the "Death Theme" from The Untouchables. Highly recommended, and Sony even released a 5.1 SACD version. Not so highly recommended is Napster to Go, a subscription music service that is somehow supposed to represent the future of music purchasing. After my old MP3 player, which did not support subscription services, started functioning erratically when I dropped it in a puddle, I decided it was time to upgrade. So I bought the hot-off-the-presses Samsung Z5, an iPod Nano rip-off that plays Windows Media files, etc. The idea of subscription music services is that you can download and switch out as many tracks as you want on the player without paying anything extra above the subscription fee, which is $14.95 a month. For those of us who buys tons of music, it should be a great deal. (You are not allowed, however, to burn these downloaded tracks to a CD.) In any event, the first time I loaded up the player, it worked perfectly and I filled it up with a bunch of subscription tracks. But when I went to put more tracks on it, it didn't work. It took two days to get a tech support reply, the canned nature of which indicated to me that my problem was not isolated. After following a series of complicated steps, I was able to put more tracks on the player, but only after erasing the other ones. Then, it worked for two days ... and stopped working again. It went back to the store yesterday and my Napster to Go trial got cancelled. Trust me, this technology is not ready for prime time. |