Friday Miscellanea

Here's something you don't see every day. Fred Astaire, playing the drums.

"These pictures, they take a lot of my time."

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Slipped Disc has a piece with a really interesting bit:

South Korea has the highest classical sales of any country in the world, running at above 20 percent of the total record market.

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Also from Slipped Disc, a cellist plays outside in the snow. They make 'em tough in Tennessee!

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Here is a link to a new documentary on Arvo Pärt.

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Laughter on the Acropolis is a review of a new translation of Aristophanes the Greek comic playwright.

Of his 40 plays, eleven remain. Mr. Poochigian has given us “Clouds” (423 B.C.), a spoof on Socrates, rhetoric, argument and education; “Birds” (414), the Utopian vision of a place that looks a lot like a perfected Athens, but in the air, with birds instead of Olympian gods in charge of the show; “Lysistrata” (411), in which the Real Housewives of Ancient Greece leverage desire in order to end the Peloponnesian War; and “Women of the Assembly” (391), in which women (the idea people and the moneymakers) establish free love, common resources and equality as the basis for a new society.

It sounds almost if they were written last week instead of 2,400 years ago.

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Pretty thin pickings this week, so let's have three envoi.  First, the Symphony No. 3 by Schubert, a piece we don't hear very often. Played by Günter Wand and the NDR Sinfonieorchester.

And here is a collection of music likely for Medieval buskers.

And here is some Bulgarian choral music. Who says we're not diverse?