Ross MacDonald CLASSICAL MUSIC S CHRISTMAS bar- rels towards us with ever greater aban- don, we, alas, must affect our own abandon of any pretense at maintaining the household budget. Fortunately, several sympathetic labels have bundled a number of budget boxes together with an eye to pleasing the frantic shopper and shareholder alike. At under $30 for four or five CDs, these sets allow you an air of extravagance fit to shame even that most distant, annual-pack- of-monogrammed-hankies relative. Very nice too is that any CDs are inexplicably received with so much greater gratitude than LPs or cassettes ever were. Curiously, many of these sets are available ~ pity — only in Canada. Though largely retreads of old recordings, considerable thought has gone into coordinating the music so that your choices can be tailored between neophyte- oriented comprehensive collec- tions and more specialized stuff for the sophisticate. _ This week the former — the lat- ter next-time. Music for the Millions, Philips (5 CDs) . ‘ Here’s the best buy in terms of quantity: 53 compositions, 35 composers, oceans of orchestras Future bright for From page 24 ; whittled down to himself and ‘ Banks) may have, with the recently completed Ripper, come up with their ultimate coup to date. “It came out of a challenge,” says Clarke of the book, which is slated for a July 1994 release and promises to solve once and for alli the mystery of Jack the Ripper. “A friend af ours said, ‘! bet you can't come up with the best explanation,’ So John and | sat down and said, ‘We're lawyers. Let's just say the London director of public prosecutions has just come to us and said the pressure is so great from the populace, that we've got to charge somebody. “ What would we do?’ ”’ Employing the process of crimi- nal profiling — a relatively new method of tracking serial criminals developed about 15 years ago by the FBI and popularized by the film The Silence of the Lambs — the Slade team set about gathering together all available factual evi- dence on Ripper suspects from books and Scotland Yard files. After extensive and exhaustive research, 20-odd suspects were narrowed to 13, then to three and finally to one. “What we're saying is you've got to have motive, means and opportunity,” says Clarke. “You've gol to know the per- son was in London, or better yet, in Whitecastle and, because there are policemen everywhere, it has and scads of stars. {f you or your giftee tend to wallow in the nether worlds of disco, rock, easy listen- ing, or (Aaak!) C&W, yet want some real music poking out of your CD rack to encourage the no- tion that you’re not entirely unciv- ilized, you can’t go much wrong with this. Here are all those things you know but don’t know you know — from Bach's Toccata and Fugue to Pachel’s Canon and Ketelbey’‘s ina Persian Market. Of course, there’s also plenty of the more obscure scattered throughout the set’s 5¥2 hours with things like Verdi's Prelude to Act 1 of La Traviata to the Overture from Glinka’s Russian and Ludmilla. You may already suspect that much of the musics are only sampled or at least abridged. You'd be right. Still, this box offers upa tidy, comprehensive package of favorites from all over the classical map. Music for the Millions is made all the more desirable by virtue of the fact that all of the performances are by recognizable — and re- spectable —~ names. Included in the cast are the Berliner Philhar- moniker, the Boston Pops Or- chestra, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and the Academy of St.-Martin-Perpetually-In-Those- Fields. Among the stars are Audre Previn, John Williams (the Star Wars guy) and Pinches Zukerman. The Orchestral Experience, Deutsche Grammophon (5 CDs) Another set of five, but this time narrowing the field considerably. “Nineteen Masterpieces’ are touted on this box though all are performed by a single band — The London Symphony — under the lone baton of Claudio Abbado. Tapering even further, those 19 “pieces” come from only eight ‘masters’ due to multiple hits of Bizet, Debussy, Ravel and Rossini. Mozart, Vivaldi, Tchaikovsky and Berg are here too, somewhat ad- hering to the ‘‘multiple’”’ scheme Michael Slade to be somebody that has some way of moving through the net. “Plus there are organs missing from the bodies, there are taunting letters to the police — how does all this fit in with the motive? “The manhunters of yesterday have become the mindhunters of today.” Needless to say, Clarke isn’t about to give anything away. Nevertheless, he feels so confident about the findings that he is prepared to present them to the Oxford Debating Society ‘‘and take on all comers. The only parameter is that any argument must be based on factual evi- dence. “Put your prosecution case forward and {ll put mine for- ward.”” : As for the macabre musings that are Michael Slade, the future is, well, bright in a rather dark kind of way. So what's it like being known as the writer-of-choice for horror fans that find Stephen King too tame? “The whole process is fun,”’ says Clarke with a sinister smirk. “It’s just plain fun.” with things like The Four Seasons and Three Pieces tor Orchestra. Unlike in Music for the Millions, however, here you get the whole enchilada. None of the works are abridged — explaining the relative paucity of selections filling a simi- Jar 5% hours. Aiso unlike MFTM, we lose that oit-irritating variety of manners that marks many : multiple-artist anthologies. There is, after all, something to be said for consistency when this amount of music is involved; though, con- versely, it would be quite unrea- sonable of us to expect every per- formance to be exceptional. 1629 Lonsdale Avenue Across from Extra Foods N. 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