Track Listing

1. My Funny Valentine
2. What Is This Thing Called Love?
3. Like Someone In Love
4. I've Got A Crush On You
5. Let's Fall In Love
6. You'd Be So Easy To Love
7. Fly Me To The Moon (In Other Words)
8. In The Blue Of The Evening
9. Moonlight Serenade
10. I'm Getting Sentimental Over You
11. In The Still Of The Night
12. You And The Night And The Music
13. Don't Take Your Love From Me
14. I Hadn't Anyone Till You
15. My Heart Stood Still
16. The Very Thought Of You
17. The Way You Look Tonight
18. You Brought A New Kind Of Love To Me
19. Night and Day
20. Come Rain Or Come Shine
21. All The Way (w/ Celine Dion)
22. Strangers In The Night

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #51443 in Music
• Released on: 2002-01-15
• Number of discs: 1

Album Description
First ever single-disc long song collection spanning Sinatra's years with Reprise Records & Capitol Records. Features Sinatra's studio duet with Celine Dion - 'All They Way'. Just in time for Valentine's Day. Reprise Records.

Amazon.com
The Sinatra who could more than convincingly offer that he had a crush on you is represented by this sweetly packaged 22-track collection. Culled mostly from the early Reprise years (with a four-cut sample of Capitol performances), Greatest Love Songs makes an airtight case for his work during the period. Often tender, occasionally enthusiastic, these selections skirt the bombast and self-parody the Chairman sometimes fell into on his own label. Popular classics like "Fly Me to the Moon" and "The Way You Look Tonight" are more than matched by keepers like the dramatically slowed Sinatra & Strings version of "Night and Day," the swinging dare of "Let's Fall in Love," and the elegiac 1961 take of "I'm Getting Sentimental Over You." Save for the thud of a studio-engineered posthumous duet with Celine Dion--an insult both to Sinatra and one of the most delicate of his signature songs, "All the Way"--this is an exemplar of the Valentine-themed album. --Rickey Wright

Customer Reviews

Sinatra = 5+ Stars, This Album Doesn't
You can hardly blame Warner/Reprise for packaging and repackaging the Sinatra catalogue any which way, and in this case I admit that the packaging is elegant. I'll hold my comments on Celine Dion til the end. That said, there is not much here that is not already available, and because Sinatra wrote the book on assembling romantic (or lovelorn, or swinging) concept albums, the whole point of re-releasing seems wholly commercial.

The songs are (almost) all superb. 'My Funny Valentine' is vocally challenging, but it sounds like it was written for Sinatra. The grand and slower 'Night and Day' is just as appealing, in a different way, as the hard swinging Capitol version from the celebrated 'A Swingin' Affair' album with Nelson Riddle. 'The Very Thought of You' is a wonderful choice, with lush orchestrations from the 'Songs from Great Britain' album that can be hard to find.' You and the Night and the Music' is a brassy Johnny Mandel-arranged swinger from 1961's 'Ring-a-Ding-Ding' -- one of my favorites from a favrite album, but a bit intense for a collection of 'love songs'. There are many other great songs here, but not all the news is good.

'Strangers in the Night' is not something Sinatra was proud of -- he apparently recorded it in a hurry to get something on the charts during the Beatle-dominated mid-1960s. It worked, it was a #1 hit, but it is kitsch and it sounds like it. 'Summer Wind' from the same album is infinitely better. Again, though, all of this material is readily available on several other collections. If you already own these, consider whether you need to invest in another album of the same.

Finally -- and I know I'll offend Celine Dion fans, and I know she has a remarkable voice -- there is no excuse for engineered duets, particularly when they tarnish one of the great standards of the Sinatra catalogue, in this case 'All the Way'. It is especially excruciating because the Reprise re-recording of 'All the Way' is one of few that genuinely gives the original a run for its money. If there is a perfect recording of a perfect song, this was it. This ersatz duet is analogous to having a very skilled painter do something a little bit different directly over the canvas of a Monet.

Do you need this for your collection? Sinatra is Sinatra, and if you are reading this review instead of shopping the latest teen wonder band you most likely take music seriously. There are dozens of classic Sinatra albums from the 1940s through the 1960s, and several ('Nice n Easy' and 'Sinatra and Strings' come immediately to mind) are better collections of love songs. While the present set is not bad -- except for the pseudo-duet, which takes 'bad' to new levels -- my recommendation would be to keep shopping.

The Master of the Romantic Ballad
When Sinatra began his career with Reprise--which makes up the bulk of this collection--in 1960, he still continued to work with long-time arranger Nelson Riddle on such classics as "Moonlight Serenade" and "The Way You Look Tonight" from 1965 and 1964 respectively. Some of Sinatra's earliest sides for Reprise ("Let's Fall in Love," "You'd Be So Easy to Love") were arranged by former Count Basie trombonist Johnny Mandel, who lends a jazz influence to the proceedings. On the standard "Fly Me to the Moon" Sinatra works with Count Basie and his Orchestra along with arranger Quincy Jones. Listening to the twenty-two tracks collected hear, it makes a compelling case that Sinatra was the finest singer of the Twentieth Century. If you're looking for the perfect Valentine album, check out Sinatra's work with arranger Nelson Riddle on Songs for Swingin' Lovers or its follow-up Songs for Young Lovers--both from 1955, arguably Sinatra's classic period on Capitol. ["My Funny Valentine" and "Like Someone in Love" are both from Songs for Young Lovers.] With that said, Great Love Songs makes for wonderful romantic background music and will serve as a suitable introduction to the genius of Frank Sinatra. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

A solid collection of Frank Sinatra love songs
"Greatest Love Songs" was released early in 2002 to be available for Valentine's Day, and while my preference is for the great thematic albums that Frank Sinatra put out in the 1950s and 1960s, this is a solid collection of 22 tracks (even when you dismiss the faux duet with Celin Dion on "All the Way"). While the album relies mainly on songs Sinatra recorded with Reprise in the 1960s, Warner was also able to pull several songs from the earlier days with Capitol. This collection includes a good share of hits, from "My Funny Valentine," "I've Got a Crush on You," and "Fly Me to the Moon" to "The Way You Look Tonight," "Night and Day," and his last #1 hit, "Strangers in the Night." The nice thing is that in picking these songs they paid attention to the songs and not just the titles. Granted, if you have an extensive collection of Sinatra albums in your music library then you probably have all of these tracks already, but instead of putting together a love song collection like this yourself you can just pick up this one. If you have discovered an affinity for Sinatra love songs, then that would be another good reason to pick up "Greatest Love Songs." You could also check out the collection "Songs for Swinging Lovers" as well as a suitable companion album to listen to what Sinatra and arranger Nelson Riddle could do when they wanted to put together an album of love songs all by themselves.