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Bloody Treadmilling

January 20th, 2009 | 2 Comments | 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:

YouTube Preview Image

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.

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