Longplayer
An evening pause: This piece of music has been playing since 1999 and will continue until 2999. Very meditative.
An evening pause: This piece of music has been playing since 1999 and will continue until 2999. Very meditative.
An evening pause: Kate Wolf sadly passed away prematurely in 1986. Here is a live performance from 1985.
An evening pause: Antonio Breschi again, this time with a piece of his own, from his album At the Edge of the Night. Last week I posted a breathtaking piano performance by Breschi, but unfortunately, I can’t find a video of him playing this particular piece, which I first heard back in the mid-1980s. Nonetheless, the music so beautiful it is really doesn’t need fancy visuals.
The first notes in the longest and slowest piece of music in history, designed to go on for 639 years, will be played on a German church organ this Wednesday.
But is it really music?
An evening pause: Composer Joe Hisaishi conducts and plays piano in this live performance of his music from the animated film, My Neighbor Totoro.
I just watched the film again with family, and my opinion of it only grows with each viewing.
An evening pause: Performed live by the Shirelles, 1964, with Shirley Alston Reeves as lead and Beverly Lee, Addie “Micki” Harris, and Doris Kenner as backup.
An evening pause: In honor of the passing of Robin Gibbs on May 20. This performance was recorded live at Festival Hall in Melbourne, Australia in 1971.
An evening pause: An Irish jig morphs into some wild and spectacular improv.
Antonio Breschi on the piano, Mairtin O’Connor, accordion, Johnny MacCarthy, flute, Jane Cassidy, bazouki, and Steve Cooney, bass. Recorded in Belfast around 1990.
Breschi by the way is probably one of the world’s best improvisational pianists.
An evening pause: Music by Art of Noise, inspired by the soundtrack from the 1960s television show, Robinson Crusoe.
The video has some incredible stop-action cloud sequences.
An evening pause: Bob Anthonioz (as Hardy) on the guitar and Philippe Bourgeois (as Laurel) on the banjo.
An evening pause: From The Sound of Music (1965). The context: The Nazis have taken over Austria, and plan to arrest Captain Georg Ludwig von Trapp and his family at the end of this concert. This lovely song, Edelweiss, is initially sung by von Trapp as a farewell to his nation. As the song unfolds, however, it becomes instead a song of defiance against the Nazis, by the von Trapps and the audience.
Always, always, we must stand for freedom.
An evening pause: The most beautiful melody from the second movement of Antonin Dvorak’s 9th Symphony, “From the New World,” performed here by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Andris Nelsons.
An evening pause: An elephant playing an harmonica? As Shakespeare said, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
An evening pause: Nice song, from Andrea Glass.
An evening pause: R.I.P. Davy Jones. This reunion performance, which included Davy Jones, Mickey Dolenz, and Peter Tork of the Monkees, occurred on June 16, 2011 at the Beacon Theater, New York City. Less than a year later, Davy Jones had passed away.
Though the audio isn’t great, the joy of the song and those singing it comes through loud and clear. Go here to hear the song as performed in 1967.
An evening pause: In honor of the 35th anniversary today of the premiere of Star Wars in 1977, a beautiful and silly rendition by the Piano Guys.
For those who were not alive in the 1960s and 1970s, it is hard to explain the impact of Star Wars. For more than twenty years, science fiction fans had dreamed of seeing a really good space opera science fiction film on the big screen. Sadly, we saw disappointment after disappointment instead. Except for Forbidden Planet (1956) and television’s Star Trek in the 1960s, practically every science fiction film about space exploration told childish stories that made no sense.
And then came Star Wars.