Orpheus In The Underworld

Not many concert band pieces have challenged the law, but this is the rebel history of Offenbach's "Orphee aux Enfers", premiered in 1858 as the world's first full-length Operetta in defiance of French laws prohibiting works of this length. Defiant too in the shockingly burlesque Galope Infernal which you and I have come to know as the raunchy raucus Can-Can. It even has the relentless throbbing in-your-face two-chord backgrounds later put to similar use by Neil Young and Johnny Rotten :)


Pure Punk for Then People.


This is opéra bouffe, a great comic romp. Our generation probably knows the whole overture more from the Bugs Bunny cartoons, and that's really not very far from the composer's intent, although perhaps tamed down a little, divesting the work from those numerous bits of contextual digitus impudicus-ness to the operetta. To start with, this is a comic send up of the whole 'noble simplicity' of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice and the performance is punctuated with jabs at famous performers and politicians alike.


Amazon: Orpheus in the Underworld

MacNamara's Band

A bit of fun to pipe you out of St.Patrick's season, a vintage sing-along cartoon that wades through some other tributes to the annual stereotype festival before it settles into a bouncing-shamrock rendition of Shamus O'Connor's war-time hit.


And what a hit it was too, solid gold for Bing Crosby back in 1945, you can hear (and sing along) that one over at Brownie-locks.


Apropos to our band-book, this song is (a tad satirically) about a community band, from the famed St. Mary's Fife and Drum Band out of Limerick, the four featured McNamara brothers emigrated to the US in the 1900's to form an ex-pat musical unit immortalized here by Bing's hit, and which, after some lyric edits and clensings, begat today's rollicking repertoire anthem to St.Patrick's.


Amazon: MacNamara's Band

Irish Tune (from County Derry)

Seeing as it's St.Patrick's day, and in recognition both of how one of the all-time repetoire favourites is Percy Aldrich Grainger's beautiful Irish Tune from County Derry and how concert bands so rarely include vocalists, here's a special Irish treat, Grainger's Irish Tune lovingly rendered here by the fabulous Leprechaun Brothers! Top o' th' Mornin' to you.

Amazon: The Muppet Show