Silver Ship
In the late 1980s, the "beautiful music" radio format came to an end when Philadelphia's Easy 101, WEAZ-FM, switched formats and call letters. It's a shame, because Suzanne Ciani's music would have been perfect there. She's a veteran keyboardist who started out composing avant-garde works on a keyboardless Buchla synthesizer. She went on to fortune as a commercial jingle writer and fame as an early New Age star. But over the years, Ciani has been plying a treacle-laced brand of instrumental music in which she wears her heart on a keyboard adorned with Hallmark valentine homilies. Though marketed as New Age, her faux-orchestral music shares more of a lineage with101 Strings, with compositions full of orchestral sweep and gentle melodies that attain the sentimental but never the serene or the sublime. "Sargasso Sea," a duet with cellist Joe Hébert, suggests that Ciani can go a little deeper, and oboist Paul McCandless ofOregonalmost pulls out "Wine Dark Sea." His beautiful multitracked oboe and English horn lines echo and intertwine with each other before he breaks out into solos.  But tracks like "Dentecane" are swept overboard by Ciani's overwrought melodies and strings. If your idea of romance is candlelit dinners, moonlit walks, and aMantovanisoundtrack, take a trip on herSilver Ship.--John Diliberto