Time for one of the big “warhorse” works for wind ensembles/concert bands! Here is Ralph Vaughan Williams’s English Folk Song Suite. It’s in three short movements, and it’s one of the most purely delightful pieces of music I know. Enjoy!
Something for…sometime
Something for Thursday
Something for Thursday
The bad news is that the BBC’s third season of Sherlock won’t air until January. Ugh! Meantime, here’s a bit of Sherlockian music!
Miklos Rozsa wrote a wonderful score for a film called The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Here is a suite from that score:
A nice contrast is this score by an underrated and underused composer named Bruce Broughton, for the film Young Sherlock Holmes. I always had a difficult time with this film, owing to its odd conversion of Holmes into an Indiana Jones-like adventurer and its somewhat downbeat ending. The music, though, is quite good.
And then there’s the BBC’s theme, which is incredibly earwormy:
By the way, my personal favorite portrayal of Sherlock Holmes came in an episode of Magnum PI, in which Patrick Macnee plays a friend of Higgins’s who has gone delusional to the point of believing himself to be Holmes. It’s a really good episode, called “Holmes is Where the Heart Is”. Worth checking out, if you have access to the show…I believe it’s on Netflix.
The game’s afoot, folks!
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Something for Thursday (Friday edition)
Whoops. Sorry, folks. Here’s some very famous Rachmaninov, the Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra on a Theme of Paganini. (The work’s most famous section, the 18th Variation, comes at the 15:28 mark, for those curious.)
The Paganini tune that forms the backbone of this work has inspired a lot of composers over the last 150+ years. We played a fascinating different set of variations on the same theme in the concert band when I was in college…but few settings beat Rachmaninov’s.
Anyway, enjoy and have a fine weekend! Maybe I’ll even have some — gasp! — new content at some point!
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Something for Thursday
Something for Thursday
It’s fall now, although here in Buffalo we’re enduring a couple more days of unseasonably warm weather: upper 70s when we really should be in the upper 60s. Oh well: it’s fall, darn it, and I’m gonna wear overalls anyway. It’s my vacation and I can do that.
As for music, well, for me the fall is when I feel the strongest sense of “awakening”, so I guess one could say that for me, fall is a bit spring-like. That being the case, here is Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, but in the original orchestration for small ensemble. As wonderful as the more commonly-heard version for full orchestra may be, there’s something refreshing about hearing the clarity of Copland’s original writing.
BTW, this work and recording are also a fine object lesson in how beautiful an instrument the bassoon is.
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Something for Thursday
Something for Thursday
Something for Thursday
I suddenly felt in the mood for some Mozart, so here’s some Mozart: his Symphone #41 in C Major, sometimes called the “Jupiter” Symphony. If Mozart had only written one twentieth of the music he wrote, and this symphony was one of them, he would still be considered one of the greats.
Note to self: Watch Amadeus with the kid. She’s as old now as I was when it came out.