Coverage of the Inauguration on Aunt & Sky

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Sporting events...or inaugurations....

Brilliant!
Except that it should have a 4/4 time signature so that Beyonce can sing it. (See other thread.)

[scottycelt]

If only Sky News would get rid of Kay Burley. She is dreadful. I have no idea how she got the job in the first place, never mind how she's managed to hang on to it for so long.

Oh come on, some of her lines are truly classic!

Only this week, when interviewing some politician regarding Dave's 'European Speech', she interrupted him by saying .. 'but surely ordinary people don't really care about the EU, what they are really concerned about are their jobs and standard of living ... ?'

[eighthobstruction]

Unfortunately there's a lot of people making that mistake Scotty.....even people on the panel of Questiontime....

[prokkyshosty]

Having already spread untruths with the Stravinsky story, I thought I should go for the double by passing along an apocryphal anecdote that one of my music professors once told me. In 1973, Nixon (being an amateur pianist of some note) programmed his own inaugural concert, bringing in his favorite band, the Philadelphia Orchestra, to play at the Kennedy Center. Along with having Van Cliburn play the Grieg concerto (which Nixon himself once played, apparently), he wanted the concert to end with the 1812 Overture. (Notably, Leonard Bernstein objected to the programming of such a hawkish work during Vietnam, so he held his own "counter-inauguration" concert at the National Cathedral featuring Haydn's Mass in Time of War, which then outdrew the original concert by leaps and bounds, but anyway).

As the story goes... when the Secret Service came during rehearsals to check out the security of the hall, they saw what Ormandy had in mind for recreating the cannon sounds indoors -- two timpani with the heads removed, with two percussionists firing rifles into the empty hulls. Needless to say, much lapel talking and ear-touching ensued.... The Secret Service went up to Ormandy and told him he couldn't use rifles in the presence of the President. "But it is the 1812 Overture!" he said. "We must have the cannons or else!" The Secret Service huddled again, and finally one of them said, "Okay, you can use the rifles. But we have to play them ourselves."

So the concert went on with Secret Service agents deputized as percussionists. I can only imagine what it looked like, with black-suited G-men, wearing aviator sunglasses and earphones, holding rifles and waiting to receive their cues from Ormandy.

[Estelle]

Prokkyshosty--
Do the lapel mikes and ear pieces go back that far?

Anyway, it's a great story!