It seems surprising that Disney would let someone else re-record some of their most recent musical moments given how much extra money they make from re-releasing the same thing in various guises (i.e. Sing-Along videos and so on). Anyway, here we have it, a collection of some of the best of the recent Disney music. Sadly, it's not really as great as it could have been. Then again, I don't think there is much that could have been done to improve the always excellent original cast recordings to be honest.
We start with The Lion King which begins with a short section from This Land, but soon moves into the opening number, Circle of Life. The choral parts, as with the rest, are excellent, the orchestra also perform admirably. There is assorted ethnic percussion to try and revive the feel of the original and this succeeds fairly well on the whole. It is when either soloists take over or the choir sings in place of a soloist is when the whole thing starts to look rather, well, tacky. I just don't think it works taking an entire choir to sing a solo line. Apart from the anything, the original soloists are always excellent, they also are playing a character, and so give life to the performance. The choir, on the other hand, just sings the notes without actually giving a whole lot of meaning to the words. Thus there is little or no character to these sections. Also, the playing with the rhythm that goes on during the original recordings doesn't happen with a choir and so it all sounds much more mechanical. The solo vocal on Can You Feel the Love Tonight isn't bad, but it sounds awfully generic to my ears. The other tracks suffer from the aforementioned choral presentations although the sections that were originally written for choir come off very well indeed.
Aladdin is just as well performed and suffering from those problems as well. Friend Like Me sorely misses Robin Williams and seems to just happen rather than sparkle like the original. The brass doesn't come off well either and give it a different tone that's hard to define, but not particularly agreeable. A Whole New World is fine, but not exceptionally. Prince Ali comes out best due to the fact that it has large choral sections and it shows in the performance.
The suite from The Little Mermaid probably works better overall than the first two. Part of World is very nicely performed, but offers nothing new to the song it must be said. Under the Sea actually works really well performed by the choir, apart from at the end, maybe when the closing lines get repeated and it suffers from starting to sound monotonous. Poor Unfortunate Souls attempts to recreate the original bitchiness, and while the voice is similar, it's just not quite as good as the original. Les Poissons along with Gaston from Beauty and the Beast is performed purely instrumentally. Both start inauspiciously but are actually quite fun when they get going. Kiss the Girl doesn't really work at all because the volume of the choir is just too much for the gentleness of the song. The finale is good and benefits from the larger orchestral sound than was used originally. At various points in Beauty and the Beast, the music from Transformation cue is used to add inserts between songs. While the opening track is titled as the Prologue, it's really a section of the Transformation. The actual transformation section occurs at the beginning of the final cue and then segues into a choral version of Beauty and the Beast and then segues into the final thirty seconds of the Transformation Cue. Belle works well, the soloist is good and the bouncing of lines around the choir as the bouncing around of lines by the soloists did in the original even if there isn't quite the animation of the original. Be Our Guest comes across splendidly and includes a joyful orchestral rendition in the middle (much like the Broadway Musical version).
Overall, if you have the original scores, there's not a great deal of point in this album as nothing much worthwhile is added (as I'd hoped when I bought it!). If you have no Disney scores, but are interested, I'd buy one of Disney's own compilations with the original recordings as these are almost always superior.
Rating ~ 
Total Time ~ 57:17