Michelle Moyer & Clyde Bawden – Silent Night
An evening pause: A nice way to close this year’s Christmas season. Hat tip Wayne DeVette, who notes this performance’s “unique arrangement.” Quite refreshing.
Category: The Evening Pause
A nightly pause from the news to give the reader/viewer a bit of classic entertainment.
Buddy Greene – How Can I Keep From Singing
An evening pause: Most people in the secular world today know this version of the hymn, but this performance of the original is so magnificent I think all should see it, whether you are Christian or not. And for those who are Christian, what better day but today to hear it.
To me, it was this performance from 1987 by Jean Redpath that is most meaningful, but in good will I — a secular humanist born a Jew — post the gospel version now.
A Christmas Carol
An daytime pause: For me, this version, starring Alastair Sim, remains the best of all the many adaptions of Charles Dickens classic short novel. Always worth seeing during the holiday season. As I wrote last year when I posted it, “I watched this again and felt like weeping, not because of the sentimentality of the story itself but because it is so seeped in a civilized world that increasingly no longer exists. There was a time when this was our culture. I fear it is no longer so. As noted by the Spirit of Christmas Present, ‘This boy is ignorance, this girl is want. Beware them both, but most of all beware this boy.’”
May all my readers have a wonderful Christmas, and a Happy New Year.
Greg Lake – I believe in Father Christmas
An evening pause: And yes, that’s Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull on the flute.
Hat tip Wayne DeVette.
Benjamin Shapiro – Theme from Schindler’s List
An evening pause: Performed live in 1996, when Shapiro was twelve years old. Note that this is that Ben Shapiro, the orthodox Jew and well-known conservative columnist whom leftists ignorantly love to call a Jew-hater and white supremacist. How they come to that conclusion can only be because they are willfully ignorant or so filled with hate and their ideology that they can’t look at reality with any honesty.
I think, during this holiday season, it is wise to also reflect on humanity’s tragic failures, one of the worst of which was the Holocaust during World War II.
Hat tip Jim Mallamace.
Aryeh and Gil Gat – The Sound of Silence
An evening pause: I think this song is fitting for the last night of Hanukkah. For Jews, this verse well describes perfectly what it is like when they try to express their point of view in a harsh and hostile world:
“Fools” said I, “You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you”
But my words like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence
The two singers are brothers and rabbis, and are performing here for an Israeli television show modeled after American Idol called Rising Star.
Hat tip Jim Mallamace.
Daniela Andrade – Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas
An evening pause: This is the second Christmas song I’ve posted by Daniela Andrade, and this is the third version I’ve posted of this particular song, one by Katie Melua and the second the original by Judy Garland.
No matter. This version is as good as the others.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
The Fifth Dimension – One Less Bell to Answer
An evening pause: Performed live on television, 1972.
Hat tip Diane Zimmerman.
Slimtime
An evening pause: Another short animated film, hat tip to Jim Mallamace.
Julie Andrews – Impossible
An evening pause: From the live television premiere of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella in 1957, their only musical written for television. Edith Adams plays the fairy godmother.
For the world is full of zanies and fools
Who don’t believe in sensible rules
And won’t believe what sensible people say
And because these daft and dewey-eyed dopes keep building up impossible hopes
Impossible things are happening every day!
I first posted this in 2011. Time to see it again.
David Essex – A Winter’s Tale
An evening pause: Performed live on television in 1982.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
Jerry Weil – Maoz Tzur (Rock of Ages)
An evening pause: A simple but powerful performance, in Hebrew and English, for the first night of Hannukah.