P.D.Q. Bach plays a fiftieth-anniversary show at Town Hall

[mjzee]

The solemn rituals that attend classical music have long made the genre an irresistible target for mockery, most of it obvious and crass. From time to time, though, a knowing insider produces a satire of classical pretensions that approaches the sublime. The honor roll of great put-ons includes Anna Russell’s impression of a vocal recitalist in majestic decline; Gerard Hoffnung’s decimations of mid-twentieth-century British concert life; Victor Borge’s Dada take on the itinerant piano virtuoso; and, of course, Peter Schickele’s anarcho-Baroque incarnation of P.D.Q. Bach (1807-1742), who is habitually described as the last of Johann Sebastian Bach’s twenty-odd children, and also the oddest. P.D.Q. made his public début in 1965, at Town Hall; fifty years on, Schickele, adopting his familiar guise as a professor of musical pathology at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople, returns to the scene of the original crime.

More here: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/12/21/forgotten-son

[fasstrack]

Should be great fun.