For some reason there’s never any leftover pumpkin pie but a seemingly bottomless pile of leftover mashed potatoes showed up this year post-Thanksgiving at my house.  I put out the call to our KDFC listeners.  What to do with a surplus of  mashies?  I knew you guys would come through for me!  Lots of great ideas.  From Shon Miller, a yummy-sounding recipe for a potato bake.  Kathy Chelini sends along a great looking potato soup,  kind of like a warm vichyssoise.  Big thanks to Anne, Camille, and Linda for reminding me about that homey stand-by, Shepherd’s Pie!

It’s our job every day. Bring the dead back to life with anecdotes and trivia about the famous and not so famous composers we feature on KDFC. Director Phil Grabsky has taken to doing it through film. The last effort was In Search of Mozart and he has recently released an in-depth look at the life of Beethoven. As a recent review put it, the best way to unlock a long dead composers life and inspiration is through the music. To that end Grabsky interviews artists who are intimately involved in Beethoven’s music, like pianists Emmanual Axe, Helene Grimaud and Lars Vogt and conductors like Sir Roger Norrington. It is a fascinating look at a complex personality blessed with an overwhelming desire to be more than the next Mozart or Haydn. He could only be Beethoven. The double DVD set is available now, but you can enjoy it on the big screen in December at these venues…

Beethoven Center, San Jose, CA – 12 Dec 09

San Francisco Roxie Film Center, CA – 18 Dec for one week

Smith Rafael Film Center, CA – 18 Dec for one week

Follow this link to more about In Search of Beethoven.

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How does a child hear music?  Through her ears, I know.  What I mean is, do children hear music without pre-conceived ideas about it?  I think they do and it’s a delight to see them embrace classical music with their whole minds and bodies.  My real introduction to classical music was a set of LPs that I bought with my own money after seeing them advertised on TV by the old-time conductor of the Boston Pops, Arthur Fielder.  Something like “The World’s Greatest Music of All Time”.  Anyway, I spent hours as a kid listening to them and can still remember that my favorites included Scheherazade and The Swan by Saint-Saens.  (I even remember listening to KDFC when I was young.)   What are your kids’ favorites? Here’s a list compiled by the BBC:

Kids’ top 10 classical music

1 John Williams Harry Potter

2 Howard Blake Walking in the Air (The Snowman)

3 Sergei Prokofiev Peter’s Theme (Peter and the Wolf)

4 Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy (The Nutcracker)

5 Sergei Prokofiev The Duck Scene (Peter and the Wolf)

6 Paul Dukas The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (Fantasia)

7 Edward Elgar Pomp and Circumstance Op. 39, No. 4 (Fantasia)

8 Johann Pachelbel Canon

9 Sergei Prokofiev Romeo and Juliet

10 Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov Flight of the Bumblebee

If Peter and the Wolf is a big favorite with your kids too, listen for my Prize @ 5 trivia this week to win tickets to hear Linda Ronstadt narrate it with the SFS Youth Orchestra on December 13th.

We’ve probably all done it at one time or another. Moved by a favorite piece of classical, maybe a big Beethoven Symphony or the like, we start “conducting”. Maybe it’s some part of “Rhapsody in Blue” and we start fingering the desk as if we are Gershwin himself at the piano. Translate those musical desires to rock music and you have the wildly popular “Guitar Hero“. But what about classical fans. Well, word is there is an “Orchestra Hero” (for lack of a better title at this point) coming from the folks who brought us “The Beatles Rock Band” video game. composer Michael Gordon writes about it in Saturdays New York Times. I especially love this line from the article.

“For me as a composer, the orchestra still holds an allure, a mystery and a sonic power that is hard to beat. One simple reason is that the orchestra has all the best toys.”

Hook me up with a “baton” controller, roll a big symphony score and I’m there.

Read all about it here.

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