Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Chit-Chat Polka by Johann Strauss Jr

Okay, so I'm not a huge fan of Polka but I have to admit that I had fun recording this piece :) It is so short and happy that I just couldn't help playing it over and over again. The kids loved it too! You may recognize the melody from the popular game "Dance Dance Revolution" which, I have read, borrows from this polka during one of the songs. My son also just came in and heard it playing, laughed, and told me that this song is also apparently in the movie "Robots". Can anybody confirm that? I'm sure he's right because he has an uncanny ability to remember things like that.

This also happens to be my first recording of anything by Johann Strauss (Jr.) - the "Waltz King". This polka has been transcribed and arranged for many different ensembles and instruments. I can't quite figure out if it was originally for keyboard or not, but the Alfred edition of the music I have has no arranger listed and also assigns it an opus number (Op. 214) so I'm assuming at this point that the work was originally composed for keyboard solo.

I hope you enjoy this delightful little piece. You can use the media player below to listen online or can visit this page of my website to download it to your computer.

1 comments:

Dane said...

I don't know about the DDR/Robots trivia, but it certainly is fun to listen to.