Omnium

Saturday, May 19, 2018

Saturday Night Music

Friedrich Gulda (16 May 1930 - 27 January 2000)

From the Munich Philharmonic Hall Munich Piano Summer Festival 1989
From the Well-Tempered Clavier Part II by Johann Sebastian Bach
0:32 Prelude in A flat major
4:12 Fugue in A flat major

From the Well-Tempered Clavier Part I by Johann Sebastian Bach
7:10 Prelude in C sharp minor
9:06 Fugue in C sharp minor
13:18 Prelude in G major
14:07 Fugue in G major

16:52 Friedrich Gulda - For Rico
20:06 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Sonata in B flat major K 333
20:06 Allegro
25:09 Andante cantabile
30:10 Allegretto grazioso

36:29 The Doors / Friedrich Gulda (arr.) - Light My Fire
44:40 Friedrich Gulda (arr.) - Die Reblaus (Traditional)

Inexpensive Progress

Inexpensive Progress

Encase your legs in nylons,
Bestride your hills with pylons
O age without a soul;
Away with gentle willows
And all the elmy billows
That through your valleys roll.

Let's say goodbye to hedges
And roads with grassy edges
And winding country lanes;
Let all things travel faster
Where motor car is master
Till only Speed remains.

Destroy the ancient inn-signs
But strew the roads with tin signs
'Keep Left,' 'M4,' 'Keep Out!'
Command, instruction, warning,
Repetitive adorning
The rockeried roundabout;

For every raw obscenity
Must have its small 'amenity,'
Its patch of shaven green,
And hoardings look a wonder
In banks of floribunda
With floodlights in between.

Leave no old village standing
Which could provide a landing
For aeroplanes to roar,
But spare such cheap defacements
As huts with shattered casements
Unlived-in since the war.

Let no provincial High Street
Which might be your or my street
Look as it used to do,
But let the chain stores place here
Their miles of black glass facia
And traffic thunder through.

And if there is some scenery,
Some unpretentious greenery,
Surviving anywhere,
It does not need protecting
For soon we'll be erecting
A Power Station there.

When all our roads are lighted
By concrete monsters sited
Like gallows overhead,
Bathed in the yellow vomit
Each monster belches from it,
We'll know that we are dead.
John Betjeman (28 August 1906 – 19 May 1984)