# Help needed in finding an obscure recording



## Major Winters (Jun 10, 2008)

Years ago I heard a hilarious recording of a philarmonic orchestra playing a medley of well known classical pieces (1812 Overture, In the Hall of the Mountain King etc), but they were played in the style of a high school orchestra, with wrong notes, mistimings and very much out of tune.

Has anyone ever heard this before and would anyone know who recorded it and where I might be able to get a copy?

Any help would be very much appreciated.


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## opus67 (Jan 30, 2007)

Hmm. Is there any chance that you might have listened to the works P.D.Q. Bach? 

http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&sea...eld-keywords=pdq bach&sourceid=Mozilla-search


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## Major Winters (Jun 10, 2008)

Thanks Opus but that wasn't the thing I was after. However I'll be buying a copy of that!

The music I'd heard was the usual arrangements of pieces played incredibly badly!


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## opus67 (Jan 30, 2007)

Major Winters said:


> The music I'd heard was the usual arrangements of pieces played incredibly badly!


I wonder why anyone would want such a recording.


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## Major Winters (Jun 10, 2008)

Because it's absolutely hilarious! Hearing professional musicians playing like a knackered school orchestra is so funny! And not the kind of thing you hear everyday... or in some cases never!


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## opus67 (Jan 30, 2007)

Now you've made me curious.


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## Major Winters (Jun 10, 2008)

It's mostly the way the cannons are mistimed in 1812, and how there it one trumpet player who fluffs every single note they attempt and how everyone is out of tune. They must have had so much fun making it!


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## shsherm (Jan 24, 2008)

The Hoffnung Festival played quite a few parodies of classical music. One I particularly remember is The Concerto for Vacumn Cleaner and Orchestra.


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## Burbage (Nov 27, 2007)

I think the vacuum cleaner thing is Malcolm Arnold's Grand Grand Overture which is a very silly piece of work indeed.

It was written for when they opened the Festival Hall in London in 1956, and, I think, formed part of a Hoffnung concert. I'm not entirely sure, as I wasn't quite alive at the time, but Malcolm Arnold died a couple of years ago, the same year that the Festival Hall got a bit of a brush-up to mark it's fiftieth, and they played it on the radio.

You don't hear it often because, as well as vacuum cleaners (four of them, I think), you also need an equal number of rifles to shoot them with, and this upsets the Health and Safety people even more than the cannon.


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## Frasier (Mar 10, 2007)

Hoffnung also staged Dennis Brain playing a concerto for hosepipe and strings (which actually turned out to be pretty good) and a version of the 1812 arranged for 5 recorders (the Dolmetsch Ensemble) and a cap-gun.


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## hansjuergen (Jan 31, 2010)

By the way, you can hear the complete album of the three Hoffnung Festivals 1956, 1958 & 1961 on Last.fm:

http://www.last.fm/music/Various+Artists/Hoffnung+Music+Festivals+1956%2C+1958+%26+1961

But I think that the described version of Tchaikovsky's 1812 overture is not part of it, so the original poster is searching for something else. On the other hand it may have been part of one of the festivals, but didn't make it on the album.


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