Funny you talk about musical interpretations. I was browsing YouTube last night and found this variation of the last movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. An interesting take I thought.
The first time I heard this Adagio was not from some orchestra but from this fellow. Didn’t even know it was a classical piece until he credits it in the liner notes.
Canned 18 pints of Honey Select corn last night. I picked about 40 ears yesterday, shucked it, and cut it up for processing. Got a lot more corn to harvest, too.
I don’t know if I’ve ever had home canned corn. I’ve always had it parboiled, cut off the cob, and frozen.
Canning would certainly be beneficial if the power were to go out for a lengthy period of time.
We’ll also freeze it, but that takes up a lot of space. Process time for a pint of corn is about an hour besides the pressurizing/de-pressurizing, which adds another 30-45 minutes. I didn’t start processing until 9pm, and I can only run 10 pints at a time, so I had to do two runs. I took the second batch out of the canner about 2am.
We’re about out of pints, so we’ll have to use quart jars. We prefer to use pints for corn as it doesn’t seem to "over cook” like with quarts, which takes 85 minutes to process. But we’ve changed some things to where maybe it doesn’t do that. Guess we’ll find out.
BTW, it takes about 2 large ears of corn cut off the cob to fill up a pint jar.
Here’s a pic of the jars after I cleaned them up. Need to label them and haul down to the cellar.
Picked another 40 ears of corn yesterday, since we’ve almost run out of pints, we ran quarts this time. Ended up with 9 quarts.
Canned 17 quarts of diced tomatoes over the last couple days. We had some extra fruit/juice, so my wife made some preserves (about 5 pints).
Preserves (on right) turned out nice, not too runny or too thick.
Got more corn to process as the rest of our crop is ripening up. Might do another run of tomatoes and cukes (sweet brine pickles).
Reviving this thread after we did a run of salsa last night. We grew the tomatoes, but bought all the rest of the ingredients - jalapenos, onion, cilantro, bell peppers. We also added some banana peppers that someone gave my wife, and I added some slivers of two habaneros and smaller slivers of a ghost pepper to add some heat.
The aroma in the house as it was cooking was quite pungent. It had a nice deep red color, with some green and yellow mixed in. The flavor is pretty good with a definite back kick of heat. We cooked up two 5qt pots of the mix, cooked it down until it thickened and put it in pint jars. We ended up canning 9 pints.
Here’s some pics. The first is the habs and ghost peppers I got from a coworker. I tried half of a GP last week and it is brutally hot. So I added half of a half pepper to each pot.
Here’s the 2025 batch of salsa. We had enough tomatoes and way too many peppers, including jalapenos, banana, bell, and Tabasco varieties. We had more than enough jalapenos so we ended up just bagging and freezing those. The Tabasco peppers added heat to the mix, almost too much, but the heat tends to mellow after canning.
Here’s some pics of the processing. We ended up with 13 pints. We had to buy the onions and cilantro as we didn’t grow any of that this year.
Various tomatoes, a few beefsteak types, but mostly smaller round varieties
Lots of large cherry type tomatoes
Just a few Tabasco peppers, very pungent and hot little pods
Various banana peppers
Lots of jalapenos
Everything getting a bath
Mixture cooking down, we add a small can of tomato paste to thicken it up
Mixture after cooking down, right before jarring up.
Final product, 13 pints total
Nice and thick, just like we like it
Plus in line with the thread title, @a_Vivaldi, I discovered a new artist, called Ola Gjeilo, a Norwegian-American modern composer who specializes in choral works.
Here’s some of his pieces that I thought were particularly interesting.
Oh nice! I’ll give these a listen later, hopefully this evening.
The last one sounds very Eric Whitacre to me
Is that a good or bad thing, in your opinion?
Haha mostly a good thing. I’m not very up to speed on contemporary classical music but his stuff sounds nice without being same-old or saccharine. I don’t know enough about harmony to be able to follow carefully what he’s doing though, so after a while his pieces can sound boring to me. Not that they are boring, just that I don’t have the ear and training to really appreciate them beyond the surface level “oh pretty sounds.”
I may have heard some Whitacre pieces, but can’t recall if they’re similar to Giello. Yeah, maybe the latter’s work appeals to me, especially the first piece because of the odd chord progressions/voicings. The dissonances add something to it that makes it interesting to me, while others might find it tedious.
Another modern composer who has a similar style is John Tavener, even tho his music seems to have an Eastern Orthodox feel to it.
Speaking of that genre, a Tchaikovsky choral piece that I recently heard that blew me away was his Hymn of the Cherubim. Heavy and heavenly at the same time. Something I would’ve never associated with Tchaikovsky.
Oh yes, eastern sacred choral music is something else! One of my favorites in the genre is Georgy Sviridov. Любовь святая and Святой Боже are two I really like. Rachmaninov even has some, though I’ve not come across any as good as that Tchaikovsky work.
A good bit older, but there’s also Vasily Titov, Всех скорбящих радосте is a very interesting listen, especially given how old the work is.
And of course, there’s the incomparable Chesnokov.
I tried to decipher the Cyrillic script and mostly figured it out, but all that does is Romanize Russian. Still had to run it thru Google translate to get the meanings.
Anyways, I pulled up some YouTube’s of the artists you mentioned and I was very impressed. Thanks for the suggestions.
I did think some of the Chesnokov pieces I heard were sublime, especially the ones with basso profundo parts in them.
Of all of them I think I liked this one in particular. I’ve heard Voces 8 do other pieces before, but nothing in Slavonic. Very nice.
You’ll probably get more and better results searching for recordings with the original Russian names, hence why I listed them that way. For some of these it’s pretty slim pickings out there.
Man, basso profundo is so cool! I love that stuff. “The Oktavism Channel” on YouTube has some really impressive recordings. There’s a few live recordings from a group called Kovcheg on that channel that are among my favorites despite the poor recording.
The piece you linked is so interesting, I kept hearing things that reminded me of wildly different eras, from contemporary all the way back to like some of that really wild late Medieval stuff.
Speaking of that, the bass singer in this recording must be part frog, I have never heard anyone sing this low ever. I have a low voice but this guy might be an “Octav” below mine. Even tho a couple weeks ago I might’ve sounded like him when I was battling the croop…
That recording and that man’s voice are glorious!!! Now I must play this on the good speaker once I get home!
Yeah his voice would rattle the windows I’m sure. I’ve heard some particular Southern Gospel singers get low, but this guy is on another level. It would give the woofers a good workout.
