Category: Tune of the day

The Hungarian band After Crying in an ELPish mood.

The Windham Hill label was notorious for new age drivel, but some of their offerings did bear listening.

Some straightforward energetic Japanese pop.

Finland may have the highest proportion of lunatic musicians among its population, but Sweden is up there, too.

Leonard Bernstein may have been a fool, but he could write music.

Francis Monkman was one of the founders of Curved Air. He left after their third album, and later joined Herbie Flowers, John Williams (the classical guitarist, not the Star Wars guy) and a couple others in the classical/prog fusion band Sky. He didn’t stay there long, either, but remained long enough to play the keys on the toccata that may or may not have been written by Bach.

Curved Air, Mark II, featuring a teenage Eddie Jobson on keyboards.

Hybrid music from the Klezmer Conservatory Band.

The opening theme to Bakumatsu Kikansetsu Irohanihoheto¹, written by Yuki Kajiura.

One the pieces that Peter Schickele claimed as his own — sorta.

Don’t go stepping on people’s feet.

Liszt tried hard, but he couldn’t top Berlioz’s arrangement of the “Rákóczi March.” It’s impossible to play this too loudly.

Would you believe a Messiaen piece that is easy to follow and fun? Well, that may be a stretch, but while you could probably write a doctoral dissertation on the musical techniques in use, this one is distinctly playful.

There are strange things in the Japanese imagination. This is from the soundtrack to Mushishi, a 2005-6 series about things weirder than fungi.

There are strange things in Poland, stranger even than the Polish alphabet. These include Księżyc.

Nineteenth-century guitar virtuoso Mauro Giuliani arranged several suites of tunes from Rossini operas for guitar, such as this.

Continue reading “Tune of the day #300”

A suite of music from Girls und Panzer, an absurd and absurdly popular anime franchise.

Ernie Freeman plays the piano. The dancers are Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers in the 1941 film Hellzapoppin’. Rimsky-Korsakov grinds his teeth.

Intermediate Zappa, with soloist Jean-Luc Ponty.

Alkan may have been the one pianist who could intimidate Liszt, but not everything he wrote was a superspectacular hypervirtuosic showpiece. Here’s a relatively simple piece, “Héraclite et Démocrite,” in which two ancient philosophers butt heads.