John Drayton's rant about the hideous Pentatone cover made me laugh - and I completely agree with his response - but I wonder if its very ugliness is vindicated by the fact that here we are talking about it, in a world where, bombarded as we are by advertising attempting to engage our attention, any publicity is good publicity. My own gripe about it is of a far different nature: as much as I esteem my reviewing colleague ST, and whose tastes I often share, as any of my regular readers will know, for me the ghastly, pretentious, effete noise Mr Bostridge makes typifies everything wrong with modern singing - but I am just poking the bear, here...
I was interested to read in his fair and favourable review of the Bostridge/Vogt Schwanengesang Simon Thompson's complaint about the glued-in booklet. I share that dislike, but also confess to a more superficial complaint.
The cover is bloody awful. In fact, all the Bostridge Schubert on Pentatone have had such butt-ugly covers, that I delayed ordering them until recently. I'm glad I did eventually buy them because they are very fine - but why would a record company choose such an off-putting set of images - ones which seem to me to trivialise the contents?
You can take my comments with a grain of salt, perhaps: having grown up in 1970s I still consider Roger Dean and Hipgnosis to be the paragons of record cover artists - but seriously, in a time of declining sales for physical media, couldn't companies make at least some effort to inspire enthusiasm in the look of their product?
OK - rant over.
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