Since March this year ( Read more... )

Young Italian conductor Carlo Tenan conducts a rip roaring second movement of Bela Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. Bartók over-prescribed this score so it can be hard for conductors to stamp their own personality on it. I think Tenan manages to admirably.

Thank you youtube, and thank you Carlo!

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A very young Sayaka Shoji plays the explosive finale of Dmitri Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto live in Tokyo with the NHK Symphony Orchestra in 2002.

Look for the beaming smile at the end!

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The National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain under Andrew Davis play the 5th movement *(the famous one) of Olivier Messiaen's Turangalila Symphony. Complete with whooping ondes Martenot!

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St. Peter's Choir did Choral Matins for BBC Radio Ulster this Sunday. If you are interested in such things, you can listen again on the BBC Website until Saturday evening.

If you listen carefully, you can hear me singing the very low D at the end of some of the responses pretty much on my own. Which I'm sure will be a great thrill for you all...

And they say Germans have no sense of humour... a bunch of Germans make a bizarre spoof rap video about... er... cooking vegetable stew. Absolute genius! And, judging from my housemate's reaction, you don't need to speak German to enjoy it either.

Morrissey to do Eurovision? Say it ain't so! Someone should tell the Grauniad it's January 9th, not April 1st.

Shades of every hubris story since the dawn of time - Eve, Icarus, Santiago, these are your boys. And the coolest thing is, even if it works, we might not know that it has worked ( Read more... )

I'd heard some rave reviews of alt-country band, the Drive-By Truckers, all originally from Northern Alabama but now safely ensconced in the college bubble town of Athens, Georgia (home to R.E.M. as well).

I've never heard any of their stuff, but when I saw their album The Dirty South out of the corner of my eye in HMV today, I couldn't resist ( Read more... )