Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, in the icy air of night!
Keeping time, time, time, in a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells—
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

Maybe Edgar Allan Poe was a little out of his mind, but you have to admit, The Bells is a pretty catchy poem. And maybe Franz Liszt was a little out of his mind, but you have to admit, his La Campanella is a pretty slick bit of piano-piano.

Despite his hair, Evgeny Kissin is not crazy. He makes this impossibly difficult piece look easy!

I don’t know much about Finland – mainly I just know they have weird spellllinnggs and llöts öf döts ïn thëïr wörrdds.

What I do know is that they love and revere their most famous composer, Jean Sibelius, so far as to making his birthday (today, December 8th) a national holiday, the “Day of Finnish Music”. And to top that, his face used to be on their currency (before they adopted the Euro). Not too shabby for a musician …

Sibelius would have been 150 years old today, if he hadn’t sadly died at the too-young age of 91. The natural thing would be to play his most famous work, Finlandia, but it’s Tuesday and I don’t want to get worked up this early in the week. Instead, here’s a delightfully melancholy work based on Finnish mythology, The Swan of Tuonela.

You never know when exactly it’s going to come, but, every day, there comes special moment in time when you know you’re no longer going to get any real work done. It’s Friday. When the time comes from you to walk out of work (on time, or perhaps, a bit earlier), do it in style – like a Sardar would.

… with thanks (apologies?) to Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov and his famous Caucasian Sketches.