Would like to throw a couple of podcasts at you — one a Q&A, the other a Music for a While. My guest on the Q&A is our own Christian Schneider. What I mean is, he writes for National Review and other fine publications. He is a Wisconsinite. We talk a fair amount of politics on our podcast — but mainly we talk Saturday Night Live (which can be pretty political itself). With Scot Bertram, Christian hosts a podcast all about Saturday Night Live. It’s called “Wasn’t That Special: 50 Years of SNL.”
Let me mention something that Christian and I discuss on our Q&A. Some time ago, I wrote a history of the Nobel Peace Prize. This was a juicy subject, for several reasons, including this: It allows you to survey the general history of the 20th century. And when you survey Saturday Night Live — you survey American cultural history from the last quarter of the 20th century through the first quarter of the 21st.
My new Music for a While is headed “A winning violinist, etc.” That violinist is Werner Hink, who was long a concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. I wrote of him in a column, here. I once interviewed him before an audience at the Salzburg Festival — interesting, delightful. Mr. Hink passed away the other week. On the podcast, I pay tribute to him with a few tracks: Mozart, Schubert, and Bach. (That’s out of chronological order, but it’s the order in which I play the tracks.)
What else? What else do we hear in this podcast? Well, there’s Rubinstein playing Prokofiev. (He did not do that very often.) There’s Hilary Hahn playing Ginastera. There’s “Things That Make You Go Hmmm . . .”
Huh? Oh, yes. I have regular cause to use that phrase: “things that make you go hmmm.” The rap in question came out in 1991, from C+C Music Factory. How do you pronounce that? How do you say it? “C plus C Music Factory”? Or “C ’n’ C”? You know, I don’t know. But the rap, I know.
Go figure.