Tag: music
The Piano
Shirley Bassey – Two songs
An evening pause: From a 1964 music video, Shirley Bassey sings two songs, Cole Porter’s “I get a kick out of you,” followed by Ben King’s “I who have nothing.”
The Beatles performing Shakespeare
An evening pause: In honor of Shakespeare’s 400th birthday in 1964, the Beatles performed this short excerpt from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. How else could you see John Lennon dressed as a girl?
Arcade Fire – Sprawl II (mountains beyond mountains)
The Grateful Dead – Mountains of the Moon
The Hastings College Choir – Home on the Range
An evening pause: This beautiful rendition brings new life to a classic American song that sadly has become so familiar most people won’t listen to it any longer.
Kate Rusby – Let me be
Beauty and the Beast – Tale as Old as Time
Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros – Home
An evening pause: Having finally arrived in Tucson after four and a half days of driving, this song seemed most appropriate. I had previously posted a version taped live in a radio studio. Here they perform “Home” on television for Letterman. The energy is still infectious.
As they say,
Ah home!
Yes we are home!
Home is wherever there is you!”
Gerry & The Pacemakers – Ferry Cross The Mersey
An evening pause: From 1965, the Top of the Pops show. I’ve always liked this song, “Ferry Cross the Mersey,” but it is also fun to watch early television, with the band attempting to simulate playing to the original recording, while the kids on the dance fall make believe they’re dancing as they repeatedly sneak peaks at the cameras.
Three Redneck Tenors – Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony
Andrea Bocelli & Sarah Brightman – Time To Say Goodbye
An evening pause: As Diane and I head west today for our new life in Arizona, this song seems especially fitting.
Hugh Laurie – All you gotta do is . . .
Placido Domingo – Furusato (My Country Home)
An evening pause: From a concert performed in Japan on April 10, 2011, only a month after the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Stay for the end, to see the audience’s response.
Gillian Welch & David Rawlings – Red Clay Halo
Richard Kiley – The Impossible Dream
An evening pause: How about something uplifting? Sung by Richard Kiley, the man who created the role.
Neil Diamond – Coming to America
An evening pause: The video is a bit too darkly lit, but the chemistry of the audience with Neil Diamond’s singing is enthralling. “Today!”
Beethoven — second movement, Fifth Symphony, performed by NBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Arturo Toscanini
An evening pause: This March 22, 1952 television performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony from Carnegie Hall by the NBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Arturo Toscanini, was probably the most remembered by the generation of our parents. I show the second movement, because it happens to be my favorite. Listen as the opening theme returns several times during the piece, only changing the last time into something even more beautiful.
Watching Toscanini as he conducts is fascinating as well.
The Ten Tenors – Bohemian Rhapsody
Shawn Colvin – I don’t know why
An evening pause: Shawn Colvin, at the 1988 Philadelphia Folk Festival, early in her career, singing one of her early hits.
Autumn Story – chalkboard animation
Yanni – Nostalgia
Loreena McKennitt – The Stolen Child
An evening pause: William Butler Yeats’ poem, The Stolen Child, set to song.
Away with us he’s going,
The solemn-eyed:
He’ll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breat,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal-chest.For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
From a world more full of weeping
than he can understand.
Cats – Gus the theater cat
Moody Blues – Forever Autumn
Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers – Follow the Fleet
Clark Jaman – a song from Shakespeare
An evening pause: Words by Shakespeare, one of Feste the clown’s songs from Twelfth Night, Act 2, scene 4. Music by Clark Jaman, done, as he says, “for a school project.” Very nice.