"Mimi Ezust" <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > I am terribly embarrassed to let everyone know that I know this bit of > information, but a long time ago, (when I was a young child, of course!) > I saw a very gawdawful bathetic movie with Liberace playing a pianist > who goes deaf. He "wrote" a popular song called "Sincerely Yours" for > the eponymous movie. Only years later did I discover that the song was > based on the Chopin Etude 0p 25#1, "Harp" ... Don't be embarrassed, Mimi. It doesn't matter how you start out on a lifetime of enjoying music, as long as you get there. It was Percy Faith's ten-inch LPs that introduced me to the riotous, colorful sound of what amounted to a symphony orchestra, and the best of those early '50s arrangements hold up to this day. I would blush to tell you about some of the stuff I listened to nearly 60 years ago... But I was already on a quest. (I always wondered where a song called "Whirlwind" came from, that Faith recorded for RCA in 1949. I recently discovered it was a cowboy song, recorded by Gene Autry!) There was Faith's "Swedish Rhapsody" (from Alfven's "Midsummer Vigil"), Provost's "Intermezzo", Richard Hayman, Leroy Anderson, all kinds of stuff that was almost if not quite classical, and real arrangements played by real musicians. This month Barnes & Noble is playing in the stores a 3- or 4-CD set of classical bleeding chunks, two or three minutes each of Romantic, Baroque etc excerpts from warhorses...and I don't mind a bit. Somewhere some kid is going to hear a snatch of Tchaikovsky or Mozart or whatever, and look for a recording of the whole piece, and be off on a lifetime's voyage of discovery. And speaking of a long time ago...In 1950 a pianist and bandleader in Chicago had a fluke hit (no. 3 in Billboard) with an instrumental recording of "Bewitched", a song from "Pal Joey" that hadn't made much of an impression until then, and subsequently became a standard...and Snyder's next release was something called "Choppin' Up Chopin", but I'll be darned if I can remember what it sounded like. An Ebay photo of the (rare) 45 rpm disc on the Tower label gives a composer credit for the other side, a pop song called "My Silent Love", but none for the Chopin rip-off. I wonder what it was; none of my reference books mentions it. Donald Clarke *********************************************** The CLASSICAL mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's HDMail High Deliverability Mailer for reliable, lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html