Sunday High Culture Interlude

Since I'm too lazy to do anything original today, why not pay homage to some art that has long touched my heart and more recently also extended solace. When words won't do and contemporary themes and sounds reek of post-modernity (or even modernity, for that matter) and alienation, nothing acts as a better restorative than classical music, broadly speaking, up until about 1950. It's complex, it's drawing on mythology or human yearning, its best practioners were geniuses – it makes a four piece 4/4 outfit almost laughable.

I think it could be said of the 'Mighty Handful' more generally – the mid-19th Century Russian composers who collaborated to develop a discrete Russian style of classical music (often incorporating more eastern elements, at least later on) – although I only know Rimsky-Korsakov and Mussorgsky, that there is something in the work of these two masters which stirs my soul and invariably brings tears to my eyes. And since the gegenseitige Erschreckung has had it's intended effect, I can say matter of factly that I have my father to thank for this, among many other things, of course. So, most of you are familiar with these two composers, so I'll try and share some hits and a few less well known pieces, at least to me.

So, right off the bat, hadn't even heard this little ditty, but it's short and has a portentious title, reflecting the long-standing enmity between Iran and Russia, with Iran being the victim more often than not, as I recall.

I remember driving through a storm near Mount Gretna, PA in the mid-1990s the first time I heard this segment of the Red Poppy Suite and it really was the right thing for a driving rainstorm and otherwise.

An instance of what more or less amounts to Muslim influence on Russian classical music.

We'd play this every Halloween, along with the Peer Gynt Suite.

And this every Christmas. I think it is about the most beautiful marriage of painting and song on the Internet.

Who says you can't jump over your own shadow?