Elephants don't forget

Scheherazade; Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, composer; Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra; Kirill Kondrashin, conducting

Hey. Do you want to see something funny? Watch this TV advertisement for Rolos, the chocolate-covered caramel candy.

Isn’t that funny? I’ve always loved that commercial. The name of the piece played by the violin when the boy pulls the candy away from the baby elephant eluded me for years. But when I bought my copy of “Scheherazade” (pronounced sha-HAIR-uh-ZOD, not SCARES-ee-AH-dee) by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakoff, I recognized the violin solo immediately.

The music, in the hands of Mr. Rimsky-Korsakoff, possesses rich and dazzling orchestrations and gets its stylistic features from the East. Historically, Rimsky-Korsakoff wanted the hearer to relate the music with tales from “The Arabian Nights”. In the end, however, he wanted the music to be enjoyed on its own merits, and not merely a page by page depiction of a musical picture book.

This is some of the most beautiful and exotic music I’ve ever heard. It gets played frequently on my iPod.

Credits: To The Hershey Company, for making Rolos since 1969. Do you love anyone enough to give them your last Rolo?

This is the eighth of my final forty-five CD's.