Following the first Celine Dion collection, All the Way: A Decade of Song, by roughly a decade, The Essential Celine Dion doubles almost everything about the initial collection: it covers two decades instead of one and has three discs, not one. It's almost an overcompensation for how All the Way concentrated on newer recordings at the expense of hits, but then again, Celine has had more hits in the ten years since All the Way, so it makes sense that Essential is a bigger, grander collection. The problem is, apart from her cover of Roy Orbison's "I Drove All Night," almost none of her new-millennium hits are as memorable as her singles from the '90s, so this triple-CD doesn't offer too much of an enticement for fans to replace 1999's single-disc set. But for those listeners who are looking for an overview of Celine Dion's two decades as an international superstar, Essential fits the bill well as it has all some of her big adult contemporary hits -- "Beauty and the Beast," "Because You Loved Me," "It's All Coming Back to Me Now," and "My Heart Will Go On" -- all sequenced chronologically. [The set was also edited to fit on two CDs.] ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine|

Rovi