The Highlights and Other Psychological Horrors

Today hasn't start too well - thanks to an accidental viewing of the synchronised swimming on Saturday night I woke up with an attack of the highlights. Bloody Russians!

OK, so it's partly my fault - I didn't have to stick around and actually watch the Russian team swancing - or is it dwimming - around to the strains of Rimsky-Korsakov's Psychosis Scheherezade - I could have moved to another room and found something else to do. And at least the musical interludes in my head weren't accompanied by visions of legs scissoring above the blue surface of a swimming pool, or a team of eight swimmers making a star figure with their bums up at the center and their splayed legs forming the outline. Well, not until I started writing, anyway.

Right now, all the orchestral bombast of that over-orchestrated little air with variations is blasting out of the stereo speakers - it's into the second part, where you get all those totally unnecessary grace notes from the harp at the beginning. All I have to do is get through the next twenty minutes without thinking too much about Tchaikovsky's Cappriccio Italien, or worse yet, the 1812 overture. They're both on the CD with the Rimsky-Korsakov - as filler essentially. Bloody Deutsche Grammophon!

Postscript: now that I've listened to the whole cloying piece I have to admit that, like Ketelbey and the Mighty Wurlitzer, Rimsky-Korsakov and synchronised swimming were made for each other.