One Instrument
Friday, August 06, 2010
Two Genres
My wife and I are heading to the wilds of rural New England this weekend. In the meantime, there is a scheduled post in the queue.
I never know what I'll get in the way of Internet access when I head up there, so I may be around from time to time to answer comments and email -- or I may be incommunicado until late Sunday.
***
In keeping with my usual practice of focusing on good things each Friday, I'll share a couple of musical pieces.
The first piece was brought to my attention by Jason, who blogs at Thoughts of an Egoist. This is Mozart's Sonata No. 18, as performed by Hu Ching-Yun.
The second, for a slight change of pace, is a solo performance of "Such a Night" by Dr. John that I'd never heard.
Interestingly, the man who posted this second video to YouTube turned out to be none other than the late David Mills, who co-wrote the HBO miniseries Treme, which my wife, who is from New Orleans, really likes.
-- CAV
Updates
Today: Made a correction.
5 comments:
Yo, Gus, you write, "The second, for a slight change of pace, is a solo performance of "Such a Night" by Dr. John that I'd never heard."
It's a good performance and the backdrop was very familiar, so I checked; that was a performance he gave on good ol' SCTV back in 1981. I'm pleased to see that the skit based around his guest performance is up on YouTube now too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3aNm-b-8Xw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fleEKn1-44M
That show was a hoot and a half at times.
For those interested, a good version of the Sonata is performed by Mitsuko Uchida, on the album "Mozart: Piano Sonatas..." The individual MP3's are available for purchase on iTunes and Amazon's Digital Music Store.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000V7GL96/ref=dm_sp_alb
The 1st and 3rd movements of Mozart's Sonata No. 18 are great--the 2nd is a different tune.
It can be bewildering sorting through the often huge number of recordings of one classical piece to find a good one.
Snedcat and Jason,
Thank you both for sharing this additional information.
Gus
Jason writes, "For those interested, a good version of the Sonata is performed by Mitsuko Uchida, on the album 'Mozart: Piano Sonatas...'"
Yes! Her recordings are some of the best. Another very good pianist for Mozart is Murray Perahia. The complete set I have is the Klara Wurtz box set; for the price it's a steal.
"It can be bewildering sorting through the often huge number of recordings of one classical piece to find a good one."
Generally what I do is open two browser windows, one for Arkivmusic, the other for Amazon. Arkivmusic is a superb website that tries to list all classical recordings in existence, or at least digitally available somewhere in the world, and it's very conveniently organized. For many pieces they have editors' picks, and often reviews as well of the recordings their editors like best, as well as from classical music magazines. Then I use Amazon for sound samples.
Thanks for that tip, Snedcat.
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