Rick Wakeman - (1997) Simply Acoustic - The Music

"Simply Acoustic is a live album recorded at the Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California. With 8000 people showing up and only 3500 seats available, plus the fact that there wasn’t a huge PA, as Rick would only perform on a grand piano that evening, meant the whole concert was also filmed and transmitted to an adjoining gymnasium. What you get here is a combination of Wakeman the classical pianist and Wakeman the entertainer, as in between songs he tells a lot of funny stories. In a way these stories are nice … if you hear them for the very first time, but they tend to become a nuisance once you play this album for the upteenth time. What should be done with this kind of recording is to edit every single track. That way you could chose what you want to hear: all of the album, just the jokes or just the music [As they did for Return… -ed.].
review by John "Bo Bo" Bollenberg on 17/09/2003
http://www.progressiveworld.net/wakeman4.html"

Track List:
01 A Wish 1' 15"
02 A Glimpse of Heaven 4' 4"
03 Catherine Howard 7' 35"
04 Morning Has Broken 3' 18"
05 Wondrous Stories 4' 6"
06 Chapel Hill 3' 39"
07 St Michael's Isle 3' 40"
08 Space Oddity 4' 4"
09 Life on Mars 3' 14"
10 The Meeting 2' 10"
11 And You And I 5' 50"
12 Merlin The Magician 5' 48"
13 Gone But Not Forgotten 7' 5"

Rick Wakeman - Grand Piano