Track Listing

1. Portrait Of My Love
2. My Kind Of Girl
3. Walk Away
4. I Can�t Stop Loving You
5. Softly As I Leave You
6. Gonna Build A Mountain
7. And We Were Lovers
8. If I Were A Carpenter
9. I�ll Only Miss Her When I Think Of Her
10. Bridge Over Troubled Water
11. Southern Star � English Version
12. Volvere Alguna Vez
13. All My Loving
14. For Once In My Life
15. Can�t Take My Eyes Off You (Spanish version)
16. What To Do
17. It�s A Wonderful World
18. Yesterday
19. Hey
20. My Way
21. I Am
22. From Russia With Love
23. Born Free
24. One Voice (previously unreleased)

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6888 in Music
• Released on: 2005-01-31
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .22 pounds

CD Description
'The Ultimate Matt Monro' is a collection of the celebratedcrooner's finest moments. Compiled from over two decades ofhit singles, this album is a perfect showcase of the light,expressive swing that characterised much of Monro's work. Includes the title track to the James Bond movie 'From RussiaWith Love'.

Customer Reviews

Must-Have Release Breaks New Ground
This is a hugely rewarding time for Matt Monro fans all over the world. To commemorate the 20th anniversary of his passing, his family has played a major role in the release of this album as well as the upcoming DVD set "An Evening With Matt Monro," which includes the only known (and newly-discovered) filmed concert from his entire career.

Matt was the greatest pop singer of the last century, and if that sounds like fawning hyperbole, maybe it will at least entice you to have a listen to this album, a compendium of his top hits with other notable tracks included to personalize the collection a bit. The centerpiece is a live rendition of "One Voice," the Barry Manilow number that Matt performed regularly in his final years (but never recorded). As always, Matt makes the song his own, keeping you interested in the song's repetitive lyric through varying interpretations and turning a sing-song tune into an anthem.

Not coincidentally, "One Voice" showcases the extraordinary power and range of Matt's voice. Engineered from a TV program, it is his only "live" recording ever released, and may represent a newly-determined resource for future live tracks, Matt never having recorded a live album.

The success of this album, which had reached into the Top 25 at the time of this writing, may propel EMI to release more cleverly-conceived compilations like it. My bigger hope, being an American, is that their U.S. division will perk up and get Matt back into stores over here, giving him a leading presence in our ongoing singers-and-standards boom. This chart success, 20 years after he left us, shows that he has passed the "timelessness" test and has proven his appeal to new and future generations.

Nice anniversary tribute to Matt Monro
Matt Monro died 20 years ago, on 7th February 1985, and this is presumably the motivation behind the release of this collection of some, not all, of his best-known material.

Popularly dubbed the "Singing Bus Driver" (his occupation between National Service and turning professional as an entertainer) when he came to fame on BBC Radio in the late 1950s, George Martin hired him to imitate Frank Sinatra (as "Fred Flange") on Peter Sellers' comedy LP "Songs For Swinging Sellers". Apart from that little commission, Matt mostly steered well clear of Sinatra numbers when it came to his own recordings, but his easy style and phrasing, not unlike Nat King Cole or Dean Martin, and clarity of diction, drew compliments from Bing Crosby and Sinatra himself.

His forte was the easy-going love-ballad, nothing over-wrought or emotional, such as "Portrait Of My Love", "Softly As I Leave You", both big hits, and the Beatles' "Yesterday", with which he made the Top Ten in both the UK and USA. His style leant itself easily to movie music of the day and it is for "From Russia With Love" and "Born Free" and (strangely not included here) "On Days Like These" (from The Italian Job) that most people will know him. He was not averse to the odd uptempo number - "My Kind Of Girl" and "Gonna Build A Mountain" are the only two included here, and were both 1960s successes.

Most of his hits and best known numbers are here - we could argue all day over tracks I thought might have been included. The shops and Amazon listings are not short of Matt Monro collections, some of which provide fuller coverage and/or better value and it's very much a case of paying your money and taking your pick. Matt was a very fine singer who managed to cover much the same ground as some of the big American names of the 50s and 60s, without copying them, by making the songs his own (just ignore "Bridge Over Troubled Water"). If you like Sinatra, or Cole, or Andy Williams, Matt will be right up your street.

Superlative
This is another amazing collection of the velevety tones of the master. But the best surprize is the release of five new tracks never released to CD before. It's been a long time coming and is aptly fitting for the 20th Anniversary. It's a great easy listening collection of his well known hits and will bring back some wonderful memories to the listener. It's also a treat that some of the oldies have been remastered. Well done EMI. Fantastic