The first authorized remix of music by the Beatles, created by the group's longtime producer George Martin and his son Giles for the Cirque du Soleil Las Vegas show Love, will be released Nov. 21. The Love album will encompass 26 tracks covering all or parts of 37 Beatles songs that are radically dissected and recombined in the Cirque show, which opened in June at the Mirage hotel.
The standard CD version will run 78 minutes; a DVD surround-sound version will contain 81 minutes of Fab Four music but no video. The Cirque show has received mostly glowing reviews for its theatrical interpretation of the group's music and history. It is the outgrowth of a friendship George Harrison developed with Cirque founder Guy Laliberte, and it was Harrison's wish before he died in 2001 that the Cirque collaboration provide a way for the group and their families to work together creatively one more time.
Paul McCartney; Ringo Starr; Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono; and Harrison's widow, Olivia, agreed to allow the group's historically tamper-proof music to be dramatically revamped by the Martins for the project from the original master tapes. In one number, Harrison's vocal from his Sgt. Pepper song "Within You Without You" is heard over the rhythm track from "Tomorrow Never Knows.
" In another, the Martins set Starr's vocal in "Octopus's Garden" against the string accompaniment to "Good Night" from the so-called White Album. "It's really powerful for me," Starr said in a statement. "And I even heard things I'd forgotten we'd recorded.
" The show is weighted heavily toward the music of Sgt. Pepper onward: Only seven of the 37 songs were recorded before 1967. The album 1, a collection of Beatles hits released in 2000, sold more than 10 million copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
The Los Angeles Times is a Tribune Publishing newspaper.
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