It is difficult to know what to make of Erik Satie. I have a CD of his piano music somewhere which demonstrates that this music was not necessarily typical. I will have to dig it out as I have not listened to it for years. The titles of the tunes were all very surreal and when you delve in to his life you start to realise he was extremely eccentric. Alot of people see him as the fore runner of the avant garde and the Dadaist movement. He was totally unique but these tunes that he is famous for are only the tip of the iceberg. He is worthwhile exploring. I am not sure that he was a genius but certainly an original - a bit like Moondog .
Was it Richies Valens that swapped with someone to be on that flight. Tell a lie I think it was The Big Bopper.
Richie Valens won his seat on the toss of a coin with Tommy Allsup, Buddy Holly’s guitar player. Valens reportedly said “that’s the first time in my life I’ve ever won anything”.
Ok, a little bit of a quizzy-pooh here. Khatia Buniatishvili plays Rachmaninov [I'm not giving away anymore] here. But which popular song tune can you hear buried in the music [that's if you're actually listening] ? If you do want to guess, PM me the answer and I'll tell you if you're correct.
Just to say that Davecg69 got it. Well done Dave, You have a good ear. If you want to guess, go ahead. No need to PM me now.
I listened to this and was baffled as I could not recognise anything familiar. It is not rare for classical compositions to have stand out themes borrowed as pop tunes. It always reminds me of the story about tenor saxophonist Jimmy Forrest borrowing a theme from Duke Ellington's extended composition "The happy go lucky local" which became an R n' B hit for him as "Night Train. " When questioned as to how he felt about this piece of musical theft, Ellington responded that it must be a good tune if everyone wanted to write it! Rachmaninov is a strange composer. I like this extract and am not familiar with it at all. He was at least a generation behind his time and I can remember my piano teacher explaining that Rachmaninov hated the developments in classical music in the 20th century. His compositions were alleged very difficult to perform because of the technical requirements and I was told that some of them are deliberately difficult as a repost against the likes of composers like Debussy. He was something of a populist composer and many critics at the time considered Rachmaninov to be superficial I have to say that I am a bit sceptical of a lot of Russian classical composers. If anything, someone like Tchaikovsky is even worse - a chocolate box composer but at least he was of his time. More modern Russian composers like Stravinsky seem a half-way house between Classical and modern. Stravinsky is a composer I find a bit cold and mechanical. I really like Scriabin who is seriously under-rated and was probably the prototype psychedelic composer as early as the first decade of 1900s. He was a contemporary of Rachmaninov and I feel the composer who took piano playing from Chopin to it's logical conclusion. His orchestral writing is pretty good too. I just feel that Scriabin defined the late romantic period in classical music whereas Rachmaninov sugar -coated it.
