Scorpions - Moment Of Glory with the Berliner Philhamoniker
Picture: C-
Sound: B- Extras: C- Main Concert: C
The most unfortunate trend in music on DVD has
artists taking their music and changing it, as fi there was something wrong
with it to begin with. Electric Light
Orchestra’s Zoom is one great failure.
New Wave acts like Billy Idol or even the New Wave-like Hall & Oates
trying to turn their music into acoustic pieces has been disastrous. Then there are those trying to add
orchestral music to their hits. Three
Dog Night had some success doing this in separate CD and DVD releases with two
different orchestras. However,
Germany’s The Scorpions bring the worst of all these worlds together for Moment
Of Glory.
In the 1980s, the band
scored 5 million-selling albums, surviving the hair-band cycle that helped kill
rock music until Grunge kicked in briefly.
They were the equal to all their American Hard Rock counterparts, having
more hits into the early 1990s, as they faded away for a while in the
states. Sadly, this project is one of
the most misguided in recent rock history.
The band has run out of steam, while some of their songs were always
silly to begin with. Their Rock
musicianship is above selling out their best hits to sappy, silly, erroneous
orchestral mixings. It also says that
their music was not important enough somehow, one of the biggest mistakes
anyone in Rock can make. This disaster
has also happened with bad Jazz mixing.
Ten of their songs get
victimized, especially “Big City Nights,” which epitomizes what went
wrong here. “Moment Of Glory” is
repeated twice! The power ballad, and
not such a good one, like any other power ballad is not any more easily mixed
with classical arrangements than “Rock You Like A Hurricane” could have
been. Add interviews with no point and
“director’s cuts” (Noooooooo!) of “Hurricane 2000,” “Moment Of Glory”
(a third time?), and “Here in My Heart,” and you’ll be reaching for that German
dictionary to find the word for overkill.
The anamorphically enhanced 16 x 9 widescreen TV
image has some of the same mastering problems as the superior Etta James - Burnin’
Down The House DVD, but not as often.
This is still pretty bad picture wise, but not as annoying as the music
content. The sound is available in
Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo, Dolby Digital AC-3 5.1 and DTS mixes, which are not
bad. The fidelity is the highlight of
the DVD, even if the content is not.
Even guest singers hurt this program. Hardcore Scorpion fans should beware that
this is NOT what they would have hoped for.
The band has gone soft, and all 100 minutes prove this, down to the
documentary shows a once respectable band throwing in the towel. Obviously, they were trying to emulate
Metallica’s more successful “S&M” project of the same type, but you
can just skip this one!
- Nicholas Sheffo
