Awesome Classical

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Pierre Fontenelle and Cristian Perciun of accordion/cello duo Made in Belgium turn in an energetic and powerful medley comprised of three tracks from the James Bond universe – John Barry’s original theme, Adele’s Skyfall, and Sam Smith’s Writing’s on the Wall.

Archaelogist dusted off Claude Debussy’s famed classical piece Arabesque No. 1 and reworked it as a masterpiece of prog rock, giving it a powerful edge we’re certain the composer could have never envisioned back in the late 19th century when he wrote it.

Listen up as NPR’s offices are filled with rich and vibrant sounds made by musician Kian Soltani and his rare Giovanni Grancino cello, made way back in 1680. The tracks are Hungarian Rhapsody by Popper, Nacht und Träume by Schubert (arr. Soltani), and Persian Fire Dance, by Soltani himself. That’s Christopher Schmitt on piano.

Musician Grant Woolard follows up his previous two classical music clips with a new medley of 70 tunes performed on piano, as more heads of composers bounce their way across the musical staff. Many of the greats are represented, from Beethoven, to Bach, to Strauss, to Mozart, to Chopin, and more. Rick Roll at 0:39.