Awesome Classical

We know from our past encounters with musician Carolina Eyck that she’s one of the world’s greatest theremin players. In this clip, she amps up the pace to that of a buzzing insect with a captivating performance of Flight of the Bumblebee on the gesture-driven electronic instrument.

A few years back, musician Alexandr Hrustevich wowed us with his mad accordion skills. Now sit back and fill your ears with this nearly 30-minute classical solo concert that includes music by Bach, Sibelius, Vivaldi, and Albinoni. All we can say is he must have some serious calluses on his fingertips.

A harpsichord requires a similar skill set to a piano, but it does need some additional knowledge to become an expert player. Vinhetiero has been playing the baroque keyboard for a long time, and he shows us the progression one might experience from the day they play their first note until they master the instrument.

Guitarist Cole Rolland and drummer Kristina Schiano teamed up for this high-energy performance of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata (3rd Movement) that gives the classical piece new life as a hard rock song. Their other collaboration is entirely on the other end of the spectrum – Eiffel 65’s 1998 Europop hit Blue.

Guitarist Marcin Patrzalek is back with another fantastic acoustic performance. His arrangement of Für Elise might not be the most traditional take on the familiar tune, but it’s the most dynamic and vibrant version of the Beethoven classic that we’ve ever heard.

The Flight of the Bumblebee is one of the most notoriously fast pieces of music you can play. Despite performing just a 1-minute excerpt of the classic, Vinheteiro spent 36 hours editing this video to make it look like his keyboard is doing all of the work, and his finger is standing still.

It used to be if you wanted to play piano, you needed an actual piano. But with modern synthesizers, software, and controllers, you can play pretty much any instrument without having one. Composerily proves that point with a performance of Mozart’s Rondo Alla Turca on an MIDI Fighter 64 8×8 controller.

While they might not use all seven octaves, piano arrangements are generally designed for an 88-key piano. Musician Nahre Sol wanted to see what would happen if she condensed famous songs down to a single octave and played them on a toy piano. She then proceeded to rank them based on quality and effectiveness.

Musician Nahre Sol performs a unique classical piano arrangement of The 12 Days of Christmas in which each verse gets progressively more and more modern. The performance starts out with the early 18th-century sounds of J.S. Bach and ends with an abstract 21st-century MIDI composition.

Musician Marcin Patrzalek has some of the most nimble fingers on the planet. Here, he absolutely slays it with a performance of Paganini’s Caprice no. 5 on his Ibanez guitar. Even if you’re not a classical music fan, it’s definitely worth a listen.

Eshan Denipitiya celebrates his love for the music of Queen with a virtuosic medley of tunes performed on a Yamaha grand piano. Watch and listen as his fingers fly across the ivories with classical arrangements of We Will Rock You, Bohemian Rhapsody, and We Are the Champions.

Musician Grant Woolard is back with the latest edition of his wonderful Classical Music Mashups. This time out, there are 70 pieces of classical music from Mozart, Bizet, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, and more. It’s Chopin’s 4-Minute Waltz that always gets us dancing at our desks.

There I Ruined It destroys another popular track. This time they combined the Sir-Mix-A-Lot hit Baby Got Back with the classical sounds of J.S. Bach, under the direction of conductor Leonard Bernstein. Our anacondas don’t want none of this.

We’re used to musician Luca Stricagnoli performing fingerstyle arrangements of popular music on guitar. This time, Luca turned his attention to a classical composition – Mozart’s Serenade in G from Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, and played it on a six-string banjo. We love how he used that little bow to make violin sounds.

Hamburg, Germany’s Miniatur Wonderland is one of the most incredible places we’ve ever seen, with amazing scale models that go on for days. The attraction has now set a world’s record for the longest melody played by a model train. Sit back and enjoy a medley of classical tunes as a miniature train taps on water-filled glasses.

Musician Jonathan Scott turned in an awe-inspiring performance of a tune normally reserved for a full orchestra – Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King from Peer Gynt. He played the solo arrangement on the gigantic pipe organ located at Müpa Budapest in Hungary. We can only imagine what this sounded like in person.

Working with recordings of The BBC National Orchestra and Chorus of Wales, London DJ Beat a Maxx created a whole new sound for Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony that even incorporates scratching. Want to get in on the remixing fun? You can download samples to make your own music at Beethoven Remixed.

Musician Luca Stricagnoli proves once again that guitars know no genre bounds. Listen and watch as his fingers fly across the fretboard as he performs an acoustic cover of Mozart’s “Rondo Alla Turca” (Turkish March), a tune typically performed on a piano, harpsichord, or clavichord.

Jacob Koller goes by the nickname “The Mad Arranger” because he loves to take relatively straightforward pieces of music and amp up the difficulty to 9000. Here, he takes Rossini’s familiar William Tell Overture and turns it into a supremely tricky jazz version. His arrangement of Mission Impossible is worth a listen too.

In a bold leaf of faith, Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu opera house staged its first concert since the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown… to a full house of houseplants. The UceLi Quartet performed Giacomo Puccini’s “I Crisantemi” for 2,292 plants, one in every red velvet seat. Conceived by Spanish artist Eugenio Ampudia.

Musician Florent Ghys isn’t what you’d call your “average” classical musician. After all, he’s played music with a game of Pong and a weather forecast. So it’s not exactly surprising that he made a virtual choir out of cats, goats, and cows, then made them perform a rendition of Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies.

Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee is known for its rapidfire sequence of notes, composed to conjure the image of a buzzing insect. The Melodica Men are here to show us how well the buzzy sounds of their mouth pianos suit the song.

Facing confinement at home, musicians continue to look to streaming video as a way to get their music out to audiences. Like other orchestras around the world, the National Orchestra of France did their part with this energetic performance of Maurice Ravel’s Boléro. The music starts at 0:49.

Way back when, there was a Tom and Jerry cartoon that featured Tom cat attempting to to play a concert while Jerry mouse tried to nap inside of his piano. CANACANA pays tribute to Hanna Barbera’s melding of music and animation by performing Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No.2 synced up perfectly with the cartoon.

Mongkol the elephant has had a rough life. His 61 years included a brutal captivity hauling trees in Thailand. But he’s since been rescued by Elephants World, and gets to live out his days enjoying visitors like musician Paul Barton, who performed this heartfelt concert for an audience of one.

DoodleChaos has an obsession with making visuals that time perfectly with music. In this clip, he built a virtual roller coaster that syncs up beautifully with the finale of Tchaikovsky’s epic 1812 Overture, complete with cannon blasts. Want to build your own coasters? Check out the software he used – Planet Coaster.