ACADEMY OF MUSIC 1974

Buyer beware: as well as this show being released by itself in 2015 via Cleopatra's Purple Pyramid imprint, it is also now available in Esoteric's remaster of Turn of the Cards. Therefore, if you have the Esoteric set - or you intend to get it in the future - you'll get this with it (minus the garish artwork!), so there's no need to get it separately in that instance.

Renaissance hit New York's Academy of Music in 1974 to perform accompanied by a live orchestra, and Academy of Music 1974 - with its generic title and its bafflingly inappropriate cover art - presents that set. Of the 9 compositions here there's 1 from Prologue, 3 from Ashes Are Burning, and five from Turn of the Cards, with only I Think Of You from that album not represented.

It's no surprise that the tracklist includes nothing from the first two Renaissance albums (the self-titled one and Illusion); indeed, the DeLane Lea live album from 1973 shows they'd exiled all those songs from their setlist even before Turn of the Cards came out, and it's really best to think of the Haslam-fronted Renaissance as a brand new band with some aesthetic ideas in common with the band's original incarnation. But it's particularly impressive that Renaissance were able to fill out a satisfying concert setlist with just the material from three albums - really two, since Prologue is basically offered as an encore.

It just goes to show that they'd come into an all-killer no-filler phase of their career. The vast majority of the songs on here would become regular concert staple of theirs - which does have the side effect that if you have a healthy collection of Renaissance live albums, you've probably already heard live renditions of a lot of these - but that's just a mark of how good the songs really are. Black Flame and Cold Is Being would vanish from the band's live set in due course - they'd both be revived for live runthroughs of the entire Turn of the Cards album in 2011, of course, but this is more or less the only official source for live performances of those two songs. (Things I Don't Understand would also slip out of sight a bit, but would be revived later - it's on the Dreams & Omens live concert from 1978, for instance.)

Since the concert was recorded for radio, the sound quality is overall excellent, though there's a couple of moments of feedback which slightly hurt the flow but do at least provide evidence that this was indeed a live recording - and that the band and orchestra were doing a dynamite job of presenting this material in a live context. It's striking to think that a year or so before Camel conquered the world with The Snow Goose, Renaissance were already showing how a prog band and an orchestra could work together vastly more harmoniously than many clunkier attempts to fuse the two in the past.