The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
An old musical hero of mine, trumpet virtuoso Maurice Andre, passed away this past weekend. I always preferred his tone to that of, say, Wynton Marsalis; Andre’s silken tone is perfectly suited to the Baroque and Classical repertoire which he tended to dominate. Though I’m no longer a trumpet player, I’ll always admire his skill and musicality.
Here is Maurice Andre, performing Haydn’s Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra in E-flat major.
Farewell, Maurice Andre!
At one point during my piano studies — mentioned the other day — I was working on this piece. I was never able to really get it ‘under my fingers’, so to speak, but that’s more a testament to some less-than-impressive work habits on my part than anything else. Oh well. Here is Chopin’s “Polonaise in A, Op 40 No 1”.
One of the people with whom I graduated high school was a guy named Dave Donavon. Dave was never particularly a friend of mine, but he wasn’t someone I disliked, either; for whatever reason, I just never got to know him all that well. We weren’t in a whole lot of classes together, and I wasn’t much of a social animal back then anyway, preferring to spend Friday nights hanging out at home. Dave was a good guy whom I didn’t know all that well. Come to that, virtually my entire high school graduating class was good people I didn’t know all that well. I’m not sure, now, how I feel about that. I don’t really regret hanging out at home, reading and watching movies and writing, but I do wonder if I missed out on some awfully cool stuff when I read people on FB saying things like, “Hey, remember when….”
Dave, sadly, suffered a heart attack and died earlier this week. Naturally, in this age we’re in, I learned about this via Twitter and Facebook, and a lot of the folks I’m friends with on FB from that era are posting their memories of Dave. I honestly don’t have any, but it still saddens me…Dave was 40 years old, the same age as me. Judging by photos, he had roughly the same body type as me right about now. And he is, to my knowledge, the first of our graduating class to die. I suppose we’re lucky in that regard, but it’s also a function of being a fairly small school where the graduating class numbered around 100.
I remember that Dave was into hard rock quite a bit back in the day, and really, hard rock’s a bug you don’t tend to get over, even as you discover other music later in life. According to my friend Andy — also from high school, and a guy who knew everybody — Dave’s favorite band was Van Halen, which means that Dave and I would have had some stuff to talk about right there, had any conversations happened. So, in memory of Dave Donavon, here is Van Halen with “Dreams”.
I’ve been watching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series lately (one episode a week, usually on Sundays — I’m up to Episode 6, ‘Travelers’ Tales’), and as always, I’m enchanted by the music of the series. Here is one of my favorite selections from the show, “Entends-tu les chiens aboyer?” by Vangelis.
After many years of watching New Year’s From Vienna every single January 1st, the most famous waltz of all time is firmly associated with January 1st. So here it is: Ricardo Muti conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in On the Beautiful Blue Danube.
Actually, here’s another one. This one, instead of ballet dancers, takes you on a journey down the entire length of the Danube, all the way to the Black Sea.
I did this a few years ago, and I figured it’s time to do it again: a video clip pertaining to Christmas each day until…Christmas. Some will be funny. Some will be straight music. Some might not be music at all. Who knows!
We’ll start with the Muppets and their take on what is my least favorite Christmas song. This now establishes that there is one version of “Carol of the Bells” to which I will listen without reaching for the ‘skip’ button!