There's a beautiful duet of Victor Borge and Leonid Hambro playing Chopin's Minute Waltz here on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWrqtJTEmBk

I've been trying to play the accompaniment part but my listening skills are not that great and I've been only partially successful.

I wonder if I could interest someone with a good ear in transcribing this and making it available? It's such a nice arrangement.

(I mean, hey, if people can listen to Horowitz's transcriptions off the record and write them down, this shouldn't even be a challenge :-)

You obviously have no idea how much work would be involved in transcribing this arrangement. "Making it available" is all well and good, but how many of us have two pianos available to play it? It would be an immense amount of work from which few people would be able to benefit.

Regards,

Oh I know all right, because I've been working on it myself, and progressing about as quickly as a dying tortoise crawling through the desert :-)
I guess what I meant is that if someone got all excited about it and wrote it down for themselves, I'd love to get a copy (and not necessarily for free either :-) If nobody bites and I end up doing it myself, I'd be glad to share it and invite improvements.

I don't have two pianos either, but I like to play it myself by interleaving bits of the alternate melody into the original.

I was a big fan of both of these guys. BTW they even made it onto the "Match Game" back in the day!

I can understand wanting a score for what they're doing, and I imagine there would be others interested in it too -- but as Bruce said, it would be a complex job, and probably not possible to do with full confidence. I wouldn't have thought so, except, taking the example of the Horowitz transcriptions that you mention, different people's attempts have differed a fair amount from one another. And, when I've played them (Stars & Stripes, and Danse Excentrique which wasn't a transcription but Horowitz's own piece), I would feel that there were many places where none of the attempts really "got it" and I would do my own try.

Gosh, I love Victor Borge. Thanks for posting that!

Let me use this as an excuse to post my favorite Borge, which has nothing to do with piano or music, except to the extent that anything about "sound" is about music. He was a multi-faceted genius.

Here's him doing his "phonetic punctuation" routine -- never fails to make me lose it completely:




....and this one is maybe even funnier -- Dean Martin doing it with him, and showing himself to be talented beyond what a lot of people probably think:

You're so welcome! I love him too.
True...unless he's chasing his tail and inspired Chopin to write such a nice piece as this! :-)

I really admire you for being able to play those arrangments. Kudos for that! So far, I can only play for first few pages of Stars & Stripes (before the "making it seem like you have four hands stuff" :-), and that's playing mostly octaves in the RH instead of Horowitz's chords. Sigh...some day... :-)

Sorry or being off topic, but do these videos exist in DVD ? They are amazing. Thank you for posting them.

Mark thanks for posting the Dean Martin, Victor Borge skit. He's a favorite of mine.

It's a start!
And I bet it's fun to play just like that.

I did sort of the same for a long time (years!) before tackling the real thing, which I did as soon as I found out that those written scores exist, and a friend sent me a pretty good one.

BTW it came at the right time. It was just shortly before 9/11. I started working on it immediately when I got it. After 9/11, playing this piece helped me feel a little less bad. I played it over and over and over, even realizing that to a great extent it must have been an exercise in self-reassurance.


Sorry, don't know! I was glad just to be able to find them online.
By the way -- and I know this is sort of an idiot question -- isn't it possible to make our own DVD's on our computers from whatever we can pull up?


My pleasure! And I'm thrilled that other people appreciate it as much as I do.

This was a revelation to me about Dean Martin. I don't mean I thought he was bad or anything like that, but I wouldn't have imagined he'd be able to do what he does on there, and do it so fantastically. It's all the more impressive because (it is said) he did his show with a bare minimum of rehearsal. I read a story about a time when Milton Berle was a guest, wanted to be doing all kinds of rehearsing and getting everything straight, and Dean just told him, "Sorry, that's not how we do things around here."

ConvertXtoDVD can make a DVD struture from any video file : AVI, WMV, MKV, MPEG. It's compatible with many formats. Here's more information here :

http://vso-convertxtodvd.en.softonic.com/

However it's not free.