Blame Jennifer for this, as she spent all day on Facebook yesterday posting bits of lyrics from The Music Man. Here’s the enchanting duet, featuring the Buffalo Bills (the barbershop quartet, not the football team) singing “Lida Rose” and Shirley Jones as Marian singing “Will I Ever Tell You”.
Something for Thursday
It’s April Fool’s Day, so here’s one of the more good-humored pieces of music I know: Leonard Bernstein’s Overture to Candide, conducted by Bernstein himself.
I don’t really have any April Fool’s stuff going on, but by all means, make it a day of silliness! Silly is good. I like the silly.
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Something for Thursday
Something for Thursday
OK, I didn’t forget this week. I’ve just had an abnormally busy couple of days, and I didn’t even have time to pre-select this week’s selection and schedule it for publication.
Anyway, here’s a little proof that classical music doesn’t have to be serious or stuffy; it can be downright silly at times. It’s Aaron Copland’s song “I Bought Me a Cat”.
This particular baritone is Thomas Quasthoff, whom I’ve heard on several recordings. I never knew, until I saw this video and did a little research, that he was a Thalidomide baby. Wow.
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Something for Thursday
Oh, crap.
Yes, it finally happened. It’s not that I didn’t get around to posting this until now, or that time got away from me. It’s that I literally forgot today was Thursday.
Ugh!
So anyway, here’s something I’ll be returning to in a future post: the miraculous third movement of Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony, in its entirety. This person has helpfully divided it into two videos, but done so in a very logical way. I’ll be exploring his performances of the entire symphony, because I’ve long had it in mind to write a really exhaustive post annotated the work and why I think it’s such a towering masterpiece. But for now, here’s the movement. Play the second part after the first, obviously. This works very well, actually, as there is an actual break in the music as Rachmaninov wrote it, a second or two of heavenly silence before things start again.
(I think a part of my deep internalization of this piece is helped by the fact that I never heard the awful pop song based on melodies from this movement, Eric Carmen’s “Never Gonna Fall In Love Again”, until just a few years ago. I heard it, of all places, on the Muzak at The Store. I stopped in my tracks and just stood there in some kind of shock when I realized that the crappy musical wallpaper I was hearing was my beloved Rachmaninov. Betrayer most foul!)
(Apropos of my recent complaint about the Buffalo Philharmonic’s almost wonderful performance of this beloved piece of mine, the section they cut from the performance starts at the 1:20 mark of the second video (roughly) and picks back up at about 3:55.)
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Something for Thursday
Something for Thursday
Japanese composer Joe Hisaishi is one of my favorite composers working today. He is best known as the composer of the music for all of Hayao Miyazaki’s films, and he is as central to there emotional fabric as John Williams is to Stephen Spielberg’s or George Lucas’s films. Here is a wonderful piano and solo violin arrangement of a theme Hisaishi wrote for My Neighbor Totoro, called “Tunnel of Wind”:
Here’s another version that is much closer to what is actually heard in the film:
Interesting to hear the difference, eh?
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Something for Thursday
A change of pace this week. Here’s one of my favorite scenes from The West Wing. The set-up is that a death row prisoner is about to be executed, and somehow (I don’t recall the particulars) it comes to pass that his only hope is a commutation from the President, who spends most of the day worrying about what to do. He asks several people for advice — his Jewish commnications director, a visiting political consultant who is a Quaker, and finally his own parish priest. Ultimately, Bartlet does…what he does here.
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Something for Thursday
We’re on the eve of the Winter Olympics, one of my favorite things in the world (the Salt Lake City Games were in progress when I launched this blog, way back when), so here’s a bit of Olympic history: Brian Boitano’s gold-medal winning free skate in Calgary in 1988.
USA! USA! USA! USA!
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Something for Thursday
Yesterday was the 51st anniversary of the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper, so this seems apropos. Here’s Don McLean.
Here are the annotated lyrics.