14 days to complete a round? What are we, the world’s longest Row, Row, Row Your Boat round? No, that gets no YouTube link. Today we get The Man, Jascha Heifetz, playing a polonaise. Except I prefer the A Major—I’ve played them both but I like the A Major better but I can’t find a Heifetz version, just the one from the Masterclass series. Also Heifetz does stuff that isn’t in the original score, but he can get away with it because he’s Jascha motherfucking Heifetz (or he was, as he’s sadly been dead for over 30 years). He does this in the Conus (even if I still despise the piece), and the Tchaikovsky (which is an extension of the Auer edition), and in the Mendelssohn he adds the octaves that were in the first edition at the end of the first movement (which I also did way back when and would do again upon a re-learning of the piece because at this point I feel like I’d have to).

Now that I’ve successfully alienated most, if not all of the audience (way to go, Senor), here’s today’s penultimate pair of polls to vote on before the bracket branches into its second round. And on an unrelated note, happy Pi Day!

Tomorrow may or may not have other Classical music dances or at least dance-based music—I don’t think you can dance to 19th century Romantic solo salon music polonaises very properly. But we’ll see. Beware the Ides, after all.