The Premiere Collection: The Best of Andrew Lloyd Webber The Premiere Collection: The Best of Andrew Lloyd Webber The Premiere Collection: The Best of Andrew Lloyd Webber is a 1988 compilation album, bringing together some of composer Andrew Lloyd Webber's best known compositions at the time of release. It includes songs from the musicals "The Phantom of the Opera", "Tell Me on a Sunday", "Evita", "Cats", "Jesus Christ Superstar", "Starlight Express" and "Requiem". Co-writers of the songs include Tim Rice, Don Black, Richard Stilgoe, Charles Hart and Trevor Nunn. The album spent two weeks at number one in the UK Compilation Chart in January 1989. It was released by
The Phantom of the Opera (1986 musical) part by an earlier musical version of the same story by Ken Hill, Lloyd Webber's score is sometimes operatic in style but maintains the form and structure of a musical throughout. The full-fledged operatic passages are reserved principally for subsidiary characters such as Andre and Firmin, Carlotta, and Piangi. They are also used to provide the content of the fictional "operas" that are taking place within the show itself, viz., "Hannibal", "Il Muto", and the Phantom's masterwork, "Don Juan Triumphant". "Here, Lloyd Webber pastiched various styles from the grand operas of Meyerbeer through to Mozart and even Gilbert and Sullivan."