La Luna
(Angel Records)
There are some songs it should be a capital offence to cover. Madonna transgressed recently by reinterpreting Don McLean's American Pie; Sarah Brightman commits a similar cardinal sin here with a version of Procol Harum's A Whiter Shade of Pale. Performers and arrangers should leave such classics alone; something you might like to do with this mish-mash of an album.
A couple of songs in, we discover what Enya and Kate Bush would have sounded like had they joined forces and gone disco; then there's a predictable reading of Scarborough Fair, followed by a Beethoven ditty sung in Italian.
From there it doesn't take Brightman long to get into her real stride, turning to the sort of bland, big-production musical-style numbers with which she made her name, guided by then-husband Andrew Lloyd Webber. The selection of odd, mis-matched contents persists with a limply jazzy Gloomy Sunday, and a similarly pedestrian Moon River brings up the rear. Strangely, this is advertised on the box as a 'hidden song'.
The special edition, by the way, comes with a bonus in-concert DVD, should you really wish to push the boat out.