things that make me smile

[lucy24]

It’s Friday.

#1. 1812 Overture [youtube.com] with cannons
#2. Stars and Stripes Forever [youtube.com] with 94 piccolos
#3. Anvil Chorus [youtube.com] with beefcake (besides, I seriously think it works better with male voices)
#4. Pirate Chorus [youtube.com] with three encores (yes, this song began as a parody of the preceding)
#5. Come Landlord Fill the Flowing Bowl [youtube.com], Celtic rock version

Not linked, because, well, I’d better not:

#6. The Limerick Song
#7. The World’s Dirtiest Song
#8. The Drunken Scotsman (“Lad, I don’t know where you’ve been, but I see you won first prize”)

To say nothing of...

#9. Can-Can, ten-hour version (I think my record is an hour and a quarter)

I should have included something by P. D. Q. Bach, but I couldn’t decide which.

[NickMNS]

It's Friday.

Paraphrasing Gordon Gekko:
"Fridays are for wimps!"
Ok maybe it was lunch:
[youtube.com...]

YouTube! Really Youtube!
Most of your suggestions are really not my thing, but at a minimum if you are going to listen to the 1812 Overture, it needs to be on vinyl, on a good pressing, on a good system, and loud. Such that when the canons go the windows shake.

Let me add a few:
Ride of the Valkyries - I'm adding a youtube link reluctantly, just because the set by Robert Lepage on this production is stunning [youtube.com...] I own the blu-ray and the sound quality is quite good for digital, but I have an instrumental version on a Sheffield Labs direct to disc pressing, which is so much better.

Opera Overtures:
Verdi's Rigoletto
Rossini's Barber of Seville and William Tell (both bugs bunny favorites)

Another recording that I really like but have not found a decent copy of (at a decent price) is Gustav Holst's the Planet's.

But really on a hot muggy Friday night, I typically prefer Jazz.
Miles Davis, King of Blue
Bill Evan's, Waltz for Debbie,
Anything with Jack DeJohnette, Keith Jarret and Gary Peacock
and really so much more...

"Mon devoir m'appel" -> My duty my shovel, so back to work I go... I have bugs to kill!

Oh one more Firday night pick, for those that like a something more contemporary or even avant-garde. I've really been into Nils Frahm lately, here another youtube link.
[youtube.com...]
Live at the Montreux Jazz fest,

[lucy24]

Ride of the Valkyries

One of the things I have to look up again and again because it refuses to stick in my mind is that it wasn’t Mark Twain who said Wagner isn’t as bad as he sounds, it was Bill Nye. (The 19th-century humorist, not the 20th-century science guy. Twain liked to quote him, with attribution.) Some years ago I worked on an ebook of The Flying Dutchman, which came with some snippets of musical score--I remember a rather glaring B-for-B-flat typo, or perhaps vice versa, that I had to check with a Knowledgeable Person, who in turn checked with her husband and came back with “No, even Wagner wouldn’t do that”--from which I learned that the melody we know as Lara’s Theme from Dr Zhivago did not originate in Hollywood.

And then there’s Sobre las Olas [youtube.com] by Juventino Rosas, in the perennial category of Melodies Everyone Knows (but nobody knows the name of).