PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION

Between 1970 and 1973 Emerson Lake & Palmer recorded 3 excellent albums + two pretty average. This is one of the average releases. This live album sounds lame to me and that's the first thing to notice. Even remastered version has that thin sound which is fine proof that in early 70's recording of live albums was a risk. Especially for experienced artists like ELP because they couldn't notice a failure with one of their first releases. They didn't notice a failure from commercial point of view. But from artistic... I don't know. These pieces of classical rock tunes are adaptation of Mussorgsky's themes plus some other pieces including that famous Lake's ballad The Sage. Some of them are played with precision some seem to be improvisations. I know that to many people this is great album because improvisations were popular at the time but to me it's not such good. I rate it by 3 stars because in remastered version bonus tracks were added and there are studio versions of Pictures.