Merry Christmas!

A couple Christmas videos for you: One with my friend Avanti Nagral at Adams House's Winter Feast, the other attempting to play "Silent Night" on the organ.

A Christmas version of Hallelelujah at a Winter feast - let’s bring in the holiday spirit early ❤️ (FULL VERSION in bio) with @jaballest @onthegoldcoast - thank you to my beautiful roommate @woman.of.the.world for taking this video! (Courtesy of Avanti Nagral)

Christmas pipes from Adams House! (Note that I don’t actually play organ. You’ve been warned. 😶)

The Great Stalacpipe Organ

Deep in Virginia's Luray Caverns sits what claims to be the world's largest musical instrument: The Great Stalacpipe Organ. Made up of tuned stalactites spread out over 3.5 acres, it can apparently be heard over all 64 acres of the Caverns without amplification.

Hear Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata here and read more about the Organ on Atlas Obscura.

As winter melts away...

This winter has been one to remember in Boston, but it looks like it's finally tapering away.  In memory of the many fallen records from the season, here's a collection of winter- and snow-inspired music over the past few centuries.

1720: Vivaldi's Winter, the Fourth of his Four Seasons concerti, performed by Gli Incogniti, Amandine Beyer soloist:

1828: Schubert's haunting song cycle Winterreise, a tale of a man's winter journey as Schubert himself reached the end of his brief life, here performed by the inimitable Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau:

Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 1, subtitled Winter Daydreams, here performed by the Royal Concertgebouw:

And finally, a more modern strain: the 3rd of Chaya Czernowin's Winter Songs, an icy, tenebrous cycle that she describes as "reflect[ing] the aspect of winter which is about being pulled into the inner cave… At the same time, underneath, in the ground, the roots of life slowly grow stiff and blindly start to search for a path between the stones.”  This performance is by Ensemble Nikel and Quatuor Diotima:

https://play.spotify.com/album/4JP8654q1KgtP0MNWzHMnJ

Music of the Spheres

Or of the comets, at least. (Via the European Space Agency)

State of American orchestras

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra reviewed the 2014-15 season in a wide range of American orchestras, and the stats are fascinating.  Highlights include:

• the 10th most performed composer (Prokofiev) was performed about 3 times as many times as the most performed living composer (John Adams)
• the average composition date for a piece is 1886, with pieces written since 2000 making up less than 10% of performances
• over 98% of compositions performed are by men, but don't worry: men composed only 85% of pieces performed by living composers

Beethoven backwards

YouTube user Aeolian Hall has an excellent collection of piano roll videos, but this is one of the most interesting: an inverted version of the 1st movement of Beethoven's 5th.  (Think DA-DA-DA-DUUUM but strangely major.)

How to be an epic conductor: The 16-step program

Last week's Bernstein was only the beginning. Courtesy of ClassicFM, including such gems as "eating the intense burrito":

A special thanks to Brendan McMullen for bringing this link to my attention!

How to conduct with your face

Courtesy of Leonard Bernstein