Hot #TenAlbumsInTenDays #2- #6 - Carl Orff - Carmina Burana

It has been a hot and worrying day today. The weather has been wonderful but I had to get back up the road before they shut Sutton Bank for the Tour De Yorkshire. That was fine but I had ordered a new washing machine from Argos and though I would go for the install and dispose option. I was worried that I would not be able to disconnect it or would end up flooding the kitchen as I don't rate myself with water pipes. Water can also be very insidious, sneaking through the most impossible of gaps sometimes over years.

That is happening tomorrow but they expect you to disconnect the old washing machine. It's been connected for fifteen years or more, and I could not get the hot water tap to move. Then you start thinking is it clockwise or anti clockwise. After a lot of messing it turns out the cold is clockwise and hot is anti clockwise, there's nothing like a bit of conformity (or not) to make life interesting.

Then it was a case of dragging the damned thing into the garage where it is sitting now awaiting a call for them to bring the new one sometime between 7am  and 7pm tomorrow, nothing like a narrow delivery slot and this is nothing like a narrow delivery slot. Still when it is fitted it will be nice to have a washing machine that doesn't sound like it's filled with metal hub caps.

I finished "The Liar" by Stephen Fry an dit's entertaining enough but hardly essential reading and now I am on to "The Good Man Jesus and The Scoundrel Christ"  by Philip Pullman which is an off kilter trip through the lives of Jesus and Christ and I'm more thatn a third of the may though after a day although it is large pring on small pages with a decent amount of white space, but I expect to finish it before the end of the Bank Holiday

I wasn't going to document my second #TenAlbumsInTenDays stint but todayday I chose my favourite classical piece. I like bits of others but this is something I love listening end to end. It sufferes from the main fault of Classical Music , the extreme dynamic ranges from almost solence to exploding noise. Samples of it have been used and reused and should be a staple of every household although Orff's work was produced under Nazi rule, but this is an amazing piece of music.

The Sand Animation video by Hungarian animator Ferenc Caco is an amazing accompaniment and you can see his work here 

OK I will leave you to enjoy this

Classical Music - The Good , The Bad and The Ugly

From an early age I learned to hate classical music. Music lessons at school consisted of a teacher putting on an album , flipping half way through , then nipping out for a fag leaving us to suffer the noise that we didnt want to listen to . But classical music was and still is deemed to be respectable , while everything else is for the uneducated proles.

Then there were great plays like Abigail's party in which Mantovani was presented as the height of sohistication , and the truly attrocious "Classic Rock" series , attempting to make rock respectable by having the melodies played by an orchestra , finally resulting in the even more attrocious "Hooked On Classics" series ,  classical music , with a disco beat "Stars On 45" style.

My reintroduction to classical music came through Alan Freeman playing "Mars" from Gustav Holst's Planets Suite on his Saturday Rock Show. Mars with its threatening martial rhythm is a superb piece , and prompted me to buy the album. A couple of listens and "Jupiter" is still my favourite instrumental piece from any genre.

Around this time John Peel started playing music by the Portsmouth Sinfonia and energetic Orchestra who basically couldnt play their instruments but tried , a bit. They backed Brian Eno on "Put A Straw Under Baby" from "Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy" and are rumoured to be making a comeback. They had at least one album and a single "Classical Muddly" . Whatever "Hooked on Classics" could do , the Portsmouth Sinfonia could realy screw up and manage to entertain in the process.

Now we have stuff like Classic FM which just presents classical music as stuff to fall asleep to . This si not so , you have Stravinsky , Wagner and lost of challenging stuff , for fun the light opera of Gilbert & Sullivan . If you were to tell me that Beethoven's 9th or something by Mozart was the greatest piece of music ever written , I wouldnt argue. My own personal favourite complete suite is Carl Orff's Carmina Burana . In "O Fortuna" it displays on of the main problems with classical music , going from quiet below human hearing level to earsplitting crescendo in a minute or so. Sound systems cant really cope. Anyway below should be a playlist of the album for you to listen to. Just because a lot of it is bland , boring , long , in a foreign language , doesnt mean it isnt worth the effort. It is , but you do have to be selective!!