For your Saturday morning viewing pleasure a little anti-Fantasia from Italy:
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At the end the conductor does motion to the percussionists to stand first for applause, before the woodwinds. As i was watching this, I was amazed that the drums had to keep that up for the length of the piece. The camera work did a nice job capturing the very gradual transition of the snare work. I thought that was neat.
Really enjoyed watching this piece. Was hoping they would do Sabotage as an encore, but maybe next time.
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Bo Derek, who starred in “10” which used Ravel’s Bolero for what many people use Ravel’s Bolero for, is, I believe, a conservative Republican.
I don’t know how I missed this show, but I did. I’m going to go binge this right now. Thank you. And this version of Bolero is perfection to me. Double thank you.
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Not really my favorite but kinda nice after a full year of Dies Irae.
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As a clarinetist in my youth, I get nervous at 3:08 when the lead chair goes upper register with the solo part.
There’s so much that can go so squeakin’ wrong.
But Thomas Middleditch is one hell of a woodwind player and he nails the solo.
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Barber’s Adagio for Strings would also be appropriate. Maybe even more so than Bolero, because its buildup is so tense and excruciating.
March 29, National Orchestra of France
April 3, NY Philharmonic
Bolero was a symptom of Ravel’s descent into terminal illness
Let’s hope that Trump wasn’t also a symptom of a terminal illness
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A news story in Nature (free to read)
The scientific paper in question (pricy)
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i have a pretty short attention span, and it always seems to me that bolero ends too soon. i find the piece fun, energetic, and soothing at the same time. love to have it on while cooking.
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sure, but so were some of the greatest works of many other artists. doesn’t make it any less “art.”
I can’t hear Bolero without thinking of the 1990 Zbig Rybczynski movie The Orchestra. A video artist made an anthology film to various pieces of music and the last segment was Bolero called “Stairway to Lenin”.
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Fair warning; I only liked the first season.
(I will quit a show in a heartbeat if the writing starts to suck…)
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Ok. Thank you for the warning. I am half way through season 1.
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I was thinking Wagner’s Ring Cycle… there’s 15 hours over four days of your life that you won’t get back if you don’t understand the background and the structure.
The impossible “Black Page” drum part makes sense in the context of Zappa’s flirting between ‘low brow’ rock and ‘high brow’ orchestrations… notes on the page against a steady high hat.
John Bonham’s drum part in Moby Dick, likewise, only really made sense to me many years later when I first heard New Orleans 2nd Line drumming… so much more exciting and engaging.
For me, being a radical left socialist, I’m thinking the 2020 election soundtrack would be in the more digestible repetition of the composer Philip Glass compared to the more existential repetitions of Steve Reiche or the powerful political loops of Public Enemy.
When I first learned that Jóhann Jóhannsson had been tagged by Denis Villenueve to score DUNE 2020, I became excited; his music for Arrival and Sicario showed what he could do for slow-ish, more cerebral film themes, so going with Jóhannsson made absolute sense to me. What a waste. What a tragedy.
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What’s this ‘uncertain aetiology,’ I thought raging crabs x5 affected the performing body. Yay ‘Tuca & Bertie.’
So I understand we need some runoff elections in Georgia to get a proper half head of steam on. And I failed to call a state enough to flip it much. Full async Kansas in '21! Somehow. [Runs very very Q&D GPT3 suasive caller v. patronising smoothie training on free cloud.]
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