Bloody Treadmilling
January 20th, 2009 Posted in classical music, shostakovich, youtube
There was a dramatic face-off between me and the Russian imperial guard in the gym today. It ended with me turning the treadmill speed down to 4mph and holding down the play button on my mp3 player, which rather unintuitively turns the thing off:
That’s the spark igniting the battle.
Ordinarily classical music kinda sucks to listen to while exercising, and so I stuff my mp3 player full to the brim with audio-books. That movement rocks for working out to, though, even if it does put me in a close to bawling kinda state. It’s a musical reenactment of the 1905 Bloody Sunday massacre, from the 2nd movemnt of Shosty’s 11th symphony.
Today it totally took my mind away from the running, as I was scheming out a very dramatic, and cinematic, and award winning-scene from a movie, with this movement as the soundtrack. Someone needs to CGI it up.
It’s a spectacular soundtrack to a non-existent film. That huge, slow crescendo breaking into dissonant full-orchestra machine-gun fire… oooo. Chills every time.
Unfortunately the YouTube sound quality leaves a lot to be desired; even more than usual. This is one of those pieces that deserve to be blasted at high fidelity through a decent pair of speakers, with the volume cranked way up.
January 21st, 2009 at 11:59 am
The sound quality is not the best, but the video makes up for it IMHO. Gergiev’s hand movements are fascinating! You can almost hear the music just by watching him.
January 30th, 2009 at 1:01 am
You know, I hadn’t even noticed the toothpick until you pointed it out. I have conductor blindness. Does he always do that?