Pianist jokes

[jay_maksim]

Sadam Husein, Hitler and Maksim are all in a room together. You have a revolver with two bullets. Who do you shoot?
Maksim two times!

(I just had the displeasure to wacht his video clip on Classical FMTV last night).

no, i shoot you... i think you are jealous of him Bernard .... jealousy pooring from your mouth.

unfortunatly for you... you wont do as well as he done in life...

[panic]

The pinnacle of 20th-century music:

"Aw dammit, why'd you have to go and roll a six?!" *reluctantly adds an F-sharp to the score*

[cfortunato]

We went to see a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony at Carnegie Hall.  It was awful.  Everything was fine until the Choral part.  But then, the choir came out to sing the Ode to Joy, and you could tell that the male singers were DRUNK.  I mean, plastered.  They were actually staggering all over the stage.  They fell into the staves, and actually knocked the violinists' sheet music off of the staff.  So before the orchestra could continue, they actually had to get got some twine and tie the sheet music onto the staff, so it wouldn't fall off again if the drunken male singers knocked it over.

So there we were....

The bottom of the Ninth,

with the score tied,

and the basses loaded.

[minor9th]

This was actually a cartoon, so I hope it tranlates into words!

A violinist and pianist are giving a recital. The pianist leans forward and whispers, "The Prokofiev is next??? I just played the Prokofiev!"

[panic]

Your mom's such a bad pianist that it takes her five minutes to play Cage's 4'33".

[allthumbs]

Here's "Farside ' cartoon for you.

[pianolist]

This poem is copyright 1973 by Rex Lawson, aka Pianolist - no reprinting it for money, kiddoes!

OH MY GAWD!

Rachmaninov, a serious child,
 By nature hardly ever smiled.
He couldn't bear to play with toys,
 Like other little girls and boys,
But, wracked by deep, consuming gloom,
 He sat alone, predicting doom.
In later life, this dismal manner
 Pervaded all his works for pianner;
Said he, "I think there's nothing finer
 "Than making music in the minor,
"But when I play a major phrase,
 "It puts me off my food for days!"
In Summer 1892
 He visited Tchaikovsky, who
Induced him, for a five pound wager,
 To write a piece in C# major:
A simple prelude, diatonic,
 Avoiding canons, enharmonic
Modulations, German sixths,
 And other contrapuntal tricksths.
Rachmaninov set straight to work
 Upon the Prelude, like a Turk,
But writing just the first two bars
 Took hars and hars and hars and hars.
"Alas," he cried, "it isn't funny -
 "I'm not concerned about the money;
"I'd give up all the tea in China
 "To write this bugger in the minor!"
But still he laboured through the summer,
 With fingers growing ever number,
Abandoning all sense of keys
 In murky, sharp-infested C's.
His friend, Tchaikovsky, in the autumn,
 Gave the piece a long post-mortem,
Saying, "Sergei, what the hell, you'd
 "Better scrap this blasted Prelude.
"Write it, damn you, in the minor,
 "Before you give yourself angina!"
Relieved, Rachmaninov concurred,
 And flattened every major third,
Completing, to the world's dismay,
 The horrid piece we know today.
Next time, therefore, your Auntie Maud
 Proclaims Rachmaninov a fraud,
Since she herself prefers the major,
 Then use this method to assuage her:
Treat her to a night in town
 And tell her, as she simmers down,
"Rachmaninov's immortal soul
 "Is like a hidden seam of coal,"
Explaining, as you wine and dine her,
 "To bring it out, it needs the minor!"

Rachmaninov and Kreisler were giving a recital at Carnegie Hall, so the story goes. Kreisler, unusually for him, lost his place in the music, leaned over discreetly to Rachmaninov and whispered, "Where are we?" "Carnegie Hall," came the lugubrious reply.

[jas]

Sadam Husein, Hitler and Maksim are all in a room together. You have a revolver with two bullets. Who do you shoot?
Maksim two times!

(I just had the displeasure to wacht his video clip on Classical FMTV last night).

no, i shoot you... i think you are jealous of him Bernard .... jealousy pooring from your mouth.

unfortunatly for you... you wont do as well as he done in life...

Oh, for God's sake. Get a grip.


This joke's ancient. It might be on the thread already, but anyway. What do you get if you drop a piano down a mine shaft?

A flat minor.

Jas

[pianistimo]

rex, you're quite a poet.  you should keep it up.  occasionally i'll enter those poetry contests and every so often they tell me that they've accepted my poetry and put it in a book or something- but then i have to buy the book at $39.00  - so who's making the money anyway?

i'm pretty good at on the spot stuff so here goes one off the top of my head:

the piano bench

there it sat thru
thick and thin,
until one day
it broke it's chin...
a very simple
fall straight over,
and the little screws
fell out like clover...
and scattered here
and there around,
as though the lid
should not be found...
a screwdriver should be here
but one this size is never near,
so tape upon the bench
was wrought,
the kind you find at
at a home improvement spot...
and then a bungee cord or two
secured in place without a screw,
and finally a cover tied with ties
to cover up the holey eyes...
and padded with a lot of cotton,
so no one knows what went rotten.
the moral of the story is
don't buy a bench with a lid,
they just fall off or scoot around,
better benches can be found.
(ones that don't hinge and are built for sturdiness)

 

[pianolist]

Thank you pianistimo - enjoyed yours too. The one that follows is a true story - it happened to me in about 1971. Eat your dinner first.

My first job out of university was managing a small orchestra in Nottingham, England. I did all the menial tasks, like putting up music stands, fixing players, giving flyers to shopkeepers to put in shop windows. And I turned pages for visiting concert pianists.

John Ogdon, whom I knew a little from my pre-student days at Decca (London Records) studios, came up to do the Shostakovich Piano and Trumpet Concerto, along with John Wilbraham, arguably the finest British trumpeter at the time. Both men were pretty large.

During the rehearsal I found John Ogdon, and asked if he wanted me to turn. "N-n-no,' he stuttered (he was very shy), "I have to record the work for Argo in a few weeks, and I must discipline myself to play without the music." I was quite relieved, because the music was very fast. But later on, during the overture of the concert, he came to me and apologised, saying that he wasn't quite confident enough, and would I mind turning after all? Well, I didn't know the music, but I guessed he would dig me in the ribs if I went wrong.

So, after the overture, I supervised moving the strings out of the way, rolling the piano in from the left, and then getting all the orchestral musicians sorted again. Finally, there was one small problem. I always put out exactly the correct amount of chairs, because extra chairs look untidy on a concert platform, and so there was no chair for me as page turner. I called backstage, and one was handed up to me.

I sat down at the piano, and pulled the chair in. My right hand stuck to the chair. It felt like a glob of chewing gum. But oh no, I looked at my hand, and I smelt my hand, and it certainly wasn't Wrigleys. Now, the Albert Hall in Nottingham is an old-style non-conformist church, so that backstage is also front of house, where the public comes in. Someone had obviously come in that evening, looked at their doggified shoe in horror, and had scraped the shoe on to the chair, the chair I was now sitting on, in full view of around 1,000 people. It wasn't chewing gum at all.

I thought I should try to go backstage. But the leader (concertmaster) and soloists were on their way in. The front desks of strings all had nasty grins on their faces. They knew. In the end, the deputy leader gave me a handkerchief, I wiped off what I could, and flushed it down the toilet at the interval.

Two things saved me. One was that, when turning pages on stage, you generally use your left hand. The other was that John Ogdon, being such a large man, perspired a great deal, and so wore enormous amounts of deodorant, which covered things up a bit.

But Shostakovich's Piano and Trumpet Concerto always reminds me of ****.

[BoliverAllmon]

great story

[pianistimo]

sounds like whoever handed you the chair wasn't very nice.  they should have smelled it before you!  very funny story though!  you sound like you've had some experience in the music world working at decca and turning for concert pianists!  elspeth sounds that way, too.  i've learned so much from people like you - and the stories.  seems that you get a wider view of the realities of performing when working for an orchestra.  if i lived closer to philly, i'd try to work at the kimmel center.  but, being so far away - and driving and parking fairly hazardous - i think i'm just going to stay in the country for now.  reading, pennsylvania (going the other way) has a lot of concert artists and though the quality is sometimes less with the orchestra there vs. philadelphia orchestra - but it's much easier to find parking and enjoy concert.  who knows, maybe they'll hire me sometime for ticketing or ushering.

once i was supposed to play a duet piano piece and found out at the last minute i didn't have a chair either.  i had a long black formal on, and was about ready to go on stage when i found out.  they said 'carry your chair with you.'  i though, 'oh, great...must figure out how to do this gracefully'  i told them i would certainly be capable of doing that  - and said 'i think i'll carry it on my head.'  thankfully, they were joking and had someone carry my chair out.  i'm usually very independent- but this long formal and a carrying a chair seemed incongruous.  did breathe a sigh of relief.