Search - Night Music, Vol. 1 - A Naxos Musical Journey on DVD

A Pleasant Experience

Margaret P. | Boulder, CO USA | 08/20/2002

(4 out of 5 stars)

""Night Music" contains pleasant classical music accompanied by pretty European scenery. The scenes are nicely photographed, with content appropriate to the music and pleasing to watch. Although the pictures don't in any way depict a story, they depict scenic countryside and waterways around Europe -- pretty and uncontroversial. Altogether, a far more pleasing TV backdrop than your DVD player's default screen saver or repetative pictures of the musicians.The video quality is about average for DVD movies. The producers did not go to the extra expense to produce a really high quality encoding. If you are a fussy viewer (as I am) and have a high resolution TV (I do) then the beautiful scenery will occasionally be marred by encoding artifacts. However, if you think DVD movies all generally look great, then the video quality will likely please you.The music is nicely performed. Care has been taken to equalize volume levels and intensity and music mood, so that this DVD could be played as background music without worrying that some songs will be too loud and others too soft. The selection includes many very popular classical music pieces.My CD/DVD player is connected to my TV and uses a common set of speakers with the TV. The best thing about this DVD is that the TV shows beautiful scenery rather than the DVD player's (ugly!) default screen saver. If you can't understand watching musicans, except in live performances, then this is the DVD for you.The DVD includes a very brief text identifying the location of the video scenes. However, that information is brief and secondary to the main purpose of the DVD. If you want an actual travelog, look elsewhere."