The Red Moon has one small crater | Once in a Red Moon

Secret Garden | Once in a Red Moon | Secret Garden

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	• Once in a Red Moon Secret Garden Decca, 2002 average customer review:based on 56 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A remarkable collection!

This music is remarkable! It is memorable, well arranged, and some of the most moving music I've heard in years. I used some of it for my wedding ceremony, and there wasn't a dry eye in the house! My favorite song is Greenwaves. Give it a try and you will see what I mean. This is music that goes right down to your soul, hangs on and won't let go!

The Red Moon has one small crater

A totally awsome album! While this album departs from the other Secret Gardens by having 3 vocals, two of them Greenwaves and Gates Of Dawn very nicely fit in with the mood of the instrumentals. The first vocal You Raise Me Up is beautiful but does not really fit with the overall mood and style of the rest of the album. Not bad, but definitely a mood changer.

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Secret Garden

Although this Secret Garden CD was very good, it is not as spectacular as some of the earlier ones.

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The most beautiul music I have ever heard

I can't stop listening to this CD. It is so beautiful and soothing. I like to fall asleep to it at night. Very rarely do you find a CD where every song is good.

Strong effort, semi-essential for Secret Garden fans

I bought this CD due to some of the selections not being on my "best of" CD.

I had heard a sample of the track "Once in a Red Moon," and found the melodic phrasing sampled to be as moving and powerful as the most beautiful melodic passages in "Adagio" and "Passacaglia." Now I know why this piece is not featured on the "best of" CD. The enclosed inner booklet describes the nature of this song as shifting from a mood of "tranquility" to "passion." The beautiful melodic phrasing that grabbed me is the "passion" part," which is repeated just twice in the selection. The rest of the piece is much slower with melodic phrasing that is nowhere near as memorable. In fact, without the "passion," part, I would have found this piece formulaic in a bland way, and not among the better Secret Garden efforts. I can only imagine if Lovland had written melodic phrasing for the "tranquility" part in the same gorgeous nature as the "passion" part.

I really enjoyed the cut, "Invitation," which is one of the more joyous of the Irish "dance" tunes that is featured on all of the SG CDs. "You Raise Me Up," and "Gates of Dawn," two of the three vocalized songs, I could listen to over and over again. Both are very spiritual songs with meaningful lyrics. "Greenwaves," is pleasant to listen to for the genre it serves. I'd rather that SG had included an instrumental song in place of this to fit in with their style of music.

The other songs, instrumentals are typical Secret Garden magic - very soothing, ethereal, uplifting music. I enjoyed "Awakening," "Duo," and "Elegie" (not for the much talked about final "global C chord," which struck me as harsh considering the elegant and powerful music which preceded it) very much and rate among the better Secret Garden efforts. What I found pleasant, but nothing more than that, were "Silent Wings," "Belonging," and "Fairytale" (this last piece I found quite unmemorable and uninspired).

This CD, as has been noted before in other posts, is more melancholy (although "EarthSongs" is fairly melancholy in its own right, too!) and more heavily weighted with Celtic music (including all the instrumentals and vocalized songs - even "You Raise Me Up," is stated as being based on an Irish tune) vs. the music found on some of their other CDs which has a greater presence of classical musical phrasings. What is noticeable is the presence of more instruments and strings being used in the background.
In the "passion" part of "Once in a Red Moon," the extra lushness adds to the emotional intensity of the music. The cello playing of Julian Lloyd Webber on "Duo" compliments the playing of Sherry, Lovland, and others.
In summary, I found the use of the full Orchestra, enhanced the musical lines and added more emotional impact.

Granted, I am rating and judging Secret Garden on its own works, not compared with others. Their work is in a class to itself, so even a CD with some sub-par efforts which I rate this CD, is still worth getting, and listening to repeatedly for obvious reasons.

The inner booklet is excellent - lyrics are provided for all songs as well as an explanation by Lovland as to the creative background of each songs.

Excluding "best of" compilations, my favorite SG items are as follows - "White Stones," "Songs from a Secret Garden" (these first two I would rate as their best), the DVD "A Night with Secret Garden," "EarthSongs," and then "Once in a Red Moon."

What do I remember most from this CD? That musical phrasing from the "passion" part of "Once in a Red Moon," the song "Gates of Dawn" (with its beautiful lyrics), the memorable tune to "Invitation," the vocal in "You Raise Me Up," and the three instrumentals that struck me as very unmemorable.

(Side note - I do not have in my collection "Dawn of a New Century," but I have heard all the songs on it, and as a collection, rate OIaRM as more desirable as representing what I like best about SG than the cuts as a whole on DoaNC. Every SG CD with the exception of "Songs from a Secret Garden" and "White Stones" seem to have one to three cuts that most of us are blase about, most other cuts as very enjoyable, and two or three cuts that are absolute gems. Such is the case I found with this CD.)

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Japanese version featuring a bonus track