Tag: Something For Thursday

One of the touchstone works of my life here: Mozart’s Sinfonia concertante for solo violin, viola, and small orchestra. The orchestra here consists of nothing but strings, horns, and oboes — and some of the most magical writing for solo violin and viola in music history. This work is, for me, one of the greatest examples of musical perfection ever composed. It is works like this that make me think that sometimes artists aren’t so much creating works of art as breaking through, however briefly, into some other realm where all is light and wonder.

Note that this performance has no conductor, and that the performers all stand throughout.

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Today is the birthday of Robert Burns, the great national poet of Scotland, whose verse flows in the very heart of that fine and noble land. In that honor, here is one of the finest Scottish singers of our day, Dougie Maclean, performing one of Burns’s works. If it gets better than this, I’d rather not know how.

For more on Burns, as always, Sheila O’Malley has you covered.

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A sad note from earlier in the week was the passing of Dolores O’Riordan, singer for the band The Cranberries. I don’t know their music very well, but you couldn’t be alive in the 1990s and not hear it at some point. I always liked her voice, with its effortless pixie-ish lilt.

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Wow. Edward Scissorhands is twenty-seven years old. That’s meaningful to me because back in February 1991, there was an oboe player in my college band that I suddenly realized was pretty cute. She let slip in conversation that she wanted to see this movie, as did I, so I invited her to see it with me.

Spoiler: she married me, and now we have dogs.

Here is a selection from what is, to me, the finest work Danny Elfman has ever done as a film composer.

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I must admit that I love a good cheesy hard rock ballad, and this might be the greatest of them all.

(And yes, I like the movie that it came from. It’s so gloriously entertaining in its jaw-dropping badness that I can never look away from it. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a lava lamp.)

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A non-musical item now!

I continue to be vexed by Aaron Sorkin, whose faults as a writer and storyteller are legion and yet who, when he manages to get it right, gets it really right. This clip (excuse the video quality, but the sound is fine and with Sorkin the dialog is mainly the thing) stitches together a small story Sorkin manages to tell in just two scenes from a single episode of The West Wing. Here he creates emotional heft, laugh-out-loud comedy based on clever wordplay, and some wonderful chemistry between two characters. I swear that my new “headcanon” is that after she left the White House in the series finale, CJ Cregg eschewed her existing job offers and instead partnered with Art and Antiquities Expert Bernard Thatch to find stolen works of art (many of which he’ll hate) and return them to their rightful owners.

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The twelfth anniversary of Little Quinn’s passing came, and went, the other day. This song always makes me think of him, and other things.

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If anything, the months since the last Thanksgiving have certainly reestablished in my mind how important it is to be centered before one goes forth to fight the good fight.

Here’s a bit of Mr. Copland (I don’t usually like to excerpt longer works, but this is an exception).

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Heavens, was today busy! Lots of stuff going on between my NaNoWriMo efforts and a seasonal uptick in things at The Store that need my attention.

And dogs. Mustn’t forget the dogs. For one thing, if you do, they bark.

Anyway, here’s a bit of Lerner and Loewe. It’s always good to return to Lerner and Loewe.

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Here’s a piece to which I return many times throughout the years. I’m actually finding that the onward lurch of current events from one awful thing to the next (seriously, humanity, why are we building such an awful future?!) particularly lends itself to the reexamination of great works of art and music from earlier periods. It’s a constant effort to remind myself that humanity isn’t just capable of staggering acts of being terrible.

Here is The Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan Williams. (By the way, make note of the album cover pictured in the video, and if you ever see that album in a store, buy it. It’s one of the great classical albums.)

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