Tag: Something For Thursday

Nettl used this the other day, and it’s sufficiently good for me to pass on to you all. Here’s the first movement of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto:

This has been one of my favorite concerted works — in fact, one of my favorite works, period — ever since I first heard it many years ago. Some of the things in this movement that always strike me are its lack of an introduction (the soloist comes in, playing the main melody of the movement, in the second bar), the placement of the cadenza in the middle of the movement instead of toward the end, and one of my very favorite passages in all of classical music, which comes at about the 2:50 moment, when the soloist climbs to a very high note, holds it a bit, and then arpeggiates back down to a very low note, which he then sustains while the clarinets play a lovely countermelody. It’s not only a gorgeous moment, but an ingenious one as well.

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Several early-morning starts at The Store this week, and a very full “To Do” list, have me feeling a bit irritable, so maybe a mood-lightener is called for. So here’s Kermit the Frog singing “Lydia the Tattooed Lady”.

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My alma mater, Wartburg College, was noted for the very high quality of its vocal music groups — still is, I suppose. Chief among these was the Wartburg Choir. I had the privilege of going on tour with the Choir in my freshman year, as they did a piece that actually included a small brass ensemble. It was a setting of my least favorite hymn of all time, “A Mighty Fortress”, but that was a small price to pay to get to hear these people on a nightly basis.

The choir closed out each concert in the same way, offering this unimaginably gorgeous setting of a spiritual as their encore. I couldn’t find a video of the actual Wartburg Choir doing it, but I did find this amazing high school chorus doing the piece. Here’s “Give Me Jesus”.

I don’t often associate pieces of music with things — even the Star Wars score has become an abstract entity for me over the years — but this is one of the rare works that transports me back to another time and another place.

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Something offbeat, but which I kind of like, since the movie is a recent favorite of mine. Here’s a medley of numbers from Saturday Night Fever.

This video contains one of my favorite tiny moments from the movie, a “blink and you miss it” bit of characterization. Tony is strutting down the sidewalk, in one of the film’s iconic moments, looking confident and masculine — you can tell by the way he uses his walk that he’s a lady’s man. But then he stops at his local pizza place, and he shows some actual vulnerability in whether to have two slices or not. In the split second interaction with the crusty lady who runs the pizza joint, all of his masculine confidence goes out the window and he’s the insecure kid.

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Going all “Showtunes” for a moment, this is one of my favorite of all Lerner-and-Loewe songs. It’s from Brigadoon, and it comes toward the end, as our hero, the American hunter Tommy, realizes his dilemma: he is in love with Fiona, and that night is falling. (This last is important because the town of Brigadoon vanishes each night for a hundred years, so Tommy can only be with Fiona if he gives up his entire world to do so.) He’s on the verge of staying, and he sings this song to Fiona. Here’s “There But For You Go I”.

The song is not heard in the film version of the show, due to time constraints, along with several other songs including two that were omitted not just for time purposes but for their risque lyrics.

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Wow, I cannot get into a blogging rhythm this week to save my life. So here’s some Mozart.

If this piece sounds a bit familiar, remember the scene from Amadeus:

Wow, I need to watch that movie again….

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Blame it on the bossa nova!

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One of my favorite bands. Here’s Blackmore’s Night, with “Under a Violet Moon”.

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Not my favorite piece in the world — I always find it a bit repetitive on the way to its unquestionably thrilling climax — but I’ve had it on the brain a bit since linking part of it in my Erich Kunzel memorial post, so here’s Seiji Ozama conducting the Berlin Philharmonic in Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. (It’s in two parts.)

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