In the interest of keeping things somewhat light and pleasant around here on a holiday-weekend Friday night, enjoy something truly gorgeous.
Simplicity itself; just variations on a most basic theme, yet heartbreakingly lovely just the same—calming, elegant, mellow, engaging, and utterly spellbinding. This is one of those pieces that really bring Congreve’s old “music hath charms to soothe the savage breast” adage right on home.
Claudia Antonelli, in case you didn’t know, is generally regarded as one of the world’s best-ever harp virtuosos, and rightly so. If you’ve never seen a harp being played live, it’s a helluva mind-blowing experience. The European pillar harp with pedals, see, is one of what I refer to as a full-body-involvement instrument—fingers, arms, back, legs, feet, all come fully into play for the harpist, as with the pipe organ, say, or the double-neck, ten-string (per neck, that is) pedal-steel guitar. It all depends on which variant of the harp they might be playing at the time; some of the four or five-string handheld harps are so simple and basic they can look downright primitive in comparison. Because, y’know, they are.
Don’t hate it me ’cause it’s beautiful, y’all.
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Huh, if I didn’t know it was a harp, because that’s what it says, just listening I would have said it was a piano. I am of course, musically challenged, so it doesn’t mean much.
I’ve never confused violin playing with bagpipes, but I’ve heard bagpipes played along with other instruments and thought momentarily it was a violin.
I suppose there are other instruments like that but I don’t know what they are.
Heh. You’d probably have a real problem, then, with Mozart’s Serenade No 10 for winds in Bb major, Barry, otherwise known as Il Gran Partita–one of the finest pieces of music I’ve ever had the good fortune of hearing. Mozart wrote two versions of it, one with string bass and one with contrabassoon instead. Although it’s not too terribly difficult to distinguish between the two; myself, I think the string bass version is not NEARLY as good, the bassoon is just a much better fit for the piece. The Serenade was immortalized in the film Amadeus thusly:
Note that the above vid features the version with contrabassoon. 😉
Well, I’ have listened to it on a few occasions, but yes, it’s all pretty mystifying to me 🙂
As we have discussed previously, I listen to WDAV quite a bit, which I always found to be the best classical station.
Beats me why I never took to the music instrument wise. It doesn’t fit my usual pattern of going all in until the next shiny penny comes along.
I did take drum lessons back around the age of 13. That ended when football practice began, as predicted by my dear Mother 🙂
Lately I have trouble playing embedded videos. I get an “error occurred” message.