To complicate matters further, because the licensing rights for some recordings expire after a fairly short period of time, the contents of a given mega- box set may partially alter after a few years (the newly reissued complete Beethoven set had almost half of its original contents replaced, whereas the Bach, Brahms, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky sets endured only minor alterations). More frustratingly, Brilliant also sometimes issues a mega- box set, and then comes back a couple of years later to issue an even bigger mega- box set (a prime instance here being the label’s Shostakovich Edition, which suddenly expanded from 2. With respect to mega- box sets of uneven quality, the temptation to wait and buy only the desired portions of those as individual releases is tempered by two limiting factors: the significantly higher price of the separate individual releases, and the aggravating fact that Brilliant does not always release all the contents of the mega- box sets as separate items. Read more other instances, however, such as here, it does the opposite-it first issues a mega- box set, and then releases single items from that individually. Sometimes, as with the Telemann mega- box set I review elsewhere in this issue, Brilliant issues single CDs and smaller sets first, and subsequently assembles those into mega- box editions.
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