What are you listening to right now?

[Pies4shaw]

Here's another you'll love: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhLlXvkm65Y

I am still waiting for an Anthrax cover of that one.

[stui magpie]

STOP DOING THAT.

You're messing with my head. I remember liking these songs.

[Pies4shaw]

Think of it as guilty pleasure, Stui. I always rather liked this one, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VwRgd_Koj8

A word of warning, though - if you don't hit "cancel" at the end, you'll find yourself listening to "Chirpy, Chirpy, Cheep, Cheep" - that's a whole other level of scary.

[Pies4shaw]

And here's one that should have earned Marc Bolan the Nobel Prize for Literature: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwC-GUHL2gU

Try to get the chorus of that out of your head.

[Pies4shaw]

Here's something to get your feet moving - Herbie Hancock's "Cantaloupe Island" performed live 20 years on by the 4 amazing musicians who performed on the original recording (Herbie, Freddie Hubbard, Ron Carter and Tony Williams), joined by Joe Henderson. This is pretty special. Watching this live, I realised that I have about 200 albums of Freddie Hubbard's trumpet and cornet but I've never seen him play. Worth many time the price of admission.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VN8zH366M8

And, if that isn't enough of one of the best jazz songs of all time, here's Herbie doing an entirely different version, live in Japan, with Wayne Shorter on soprano sax and Stanley Clarke on bass with Omar Hakim on drums:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JixfzsQWZ8c

[Pies4shaw]

So, from the sublime to the sublimer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tm1cV1PMUWM

Audio only of Jorge Bolet playing Liszt's Sonata in B Minor. This is one of the most wonderful pieces of music ever written - but you've probably never heard it because there are perhaps no more than a handful of pianists who have had the chops to hit most of the notes, let alone to give a proper performance of it.

This is a very high quality recording of a live performance from Berlin in 1969. Give yourself the half hour - you won't regret it. It is the work of a fellow whose skills went beyond mere mastery of the enormous technical challenges of the music - Bolet's interpretive skills and broad tonal palette (his playing is genuinely orchestral - not in the sense that he makes the piano sound like violins and such but in the sense that there is so much light and shade in his playing and that he gets such a remarkable range of sounds from his instrument) shine through. Almost paradoxically - given the incredible virtuosity required to play this music, Jorge wasn't a show off. There is no "look Mum, no hands" about this - nothing is done to show how "tricky" his fingers are - everything is done to advance his reading of the music. Sadly, that's the reason he wasn't ever famous in the way some others were. I remember standing outside the Hall at the half-time break in a Bolet recital at our Melbourne Concert Hall (Hamer Hall, as it's now called) in 1987. He'd just played Schumann's Fantasie in C and Greig's Ballade and I was absolutely blown away by what I'd heard. Anyway, I overheard someone else say, "Well it was OK - but he's not of the first rank, is he?". The recital I'd been watching at the same time stands out like a beacon as the single greatest musical performance I have witnessed in my entire life. Even so, the sentiment I overheard seems to have been a reasonably wide-spread response to Bolet hiding his virtuosity for the sake of the music. Put simply, he could play faster than anybody, ever, with more control than anybody, ever - but he didn't play fast unless he thought the music required it, whereas many of the "great virtuosi" got that label by putting their "show" ahead of what they were playing.

Anyway, someone has broken into the archives of Radio Berlin and found a treasure trove of Bolet's live-to-air performances. Two sets of CDs (one of 3 discs and another of one disc) taken from those have been released by a company called Audite and I've been listening to them. I'm posting this link, instead, because, so far as I know, this recording hasn't yet been released commercially.

To try to illustrate Bolet's approach to the music in a way that those of you who aren't fascinated by the piano as I am should be able to hear, here's a link to him playing one of Debussy's most loved pieces. "The Girl With the Flaxen Hair' is about a fifth-grade piece in terms of difficulty and plenty of you probably were made to learn it when you were young. This is what 2 minutes and 45 seconds of simple Debussy sounded like under the hands of the greatest pianist I ever saw:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tm1cV1PMUWM

If you liked that, then here's "Clair de Lune", which you will all know, another fifth or sixth grade piece:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-A15WEucWA

[stui magpie]

The first and second link are the same.

I listened to 5 minutes of it, the boy is good. Has some fkn quick fingers

[Pies4shaw]

[Pies4shaw]

Here's the link to Jorge Bolet's recording of La fille aux cheveux de lin, as intended:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIDXtRxCeAg

[Pies4shaw]

And - wow, wow, wow - in one of those moments rather like when your team calls our Scott Pendlebury with pick 5 at the National Draft, here's a new (that is, to me - I thought I'd heard everything Jorge ever recorded) performance of Jorge playing John LaMontaine's piano concerto "In Time of War" opus 9. This piece (composed 1958) of music won the Pullitzer Prize in 1959. This is the premiere - JB with the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Charles Munch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8L_-HV-GcRI

I don't expect that this will be to everyone's taste but the playing is, as ever, astonishing. The music itself strikes me (on first hearing, only about 10 minutes in) as heavily influenced by Prokofiev - but that's no bad thing.

[think positive]

cheapest Celine Dion tickets for Rod Laver are $400!

Just scored a couple for $125 each - In Vegas! Yeah Baby!

[Pies4shaw]

How much is it to see Rod Laver sing on his own?

[think positive]

[Pies4shaw]

Ok, then - how much to see Celine Dion play tennis quietly?

[Dark Beanie]