musicalia

1. The New Century Chamber Orchestra, reviewed. I enjoyed the rest of the concert, but the Brahms gives you the opportunity to see how I write for publication when I really dislike the artistic quality of the performance. Not since that listless Franck Quintet at Menlo ...

2. You have never heard Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto, at least the way Tchaikovsky wrote it. My question is particularly for anyone not an intense classical listener who makes it all the way through the sound clips: how much of a difference do you think these scoring changes make?

3. Mark Evanier reports on a lost Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch with video attached. The strange thing is that this sketch, which is the pre-titles sequence of Episode 38, is included in the script book (The Complete Monty Python's Flying Circus: All the Words, Pantheon, 1989), but I never noticed before that there was a sequence missing from the DVD. I thought I'd long ago watched them all with script book in hand; I've marked in the book a few spots where the script doesn't match the program. Yet some how I missed this, and the fact that most of the same episode's post-credits sequence at the end is also missing from the DVD.

The other thing I'll note from the video is that John Cleese dancing looks a lot like John Cleese doing his silly walk.