Can't slip into that holiday spirit while shoulder-to-shoulder with your fellow man among the year-end shopping mall madness? Do as the Japanese! Your credit card debits are rewarded with strains of Beethoven's ubiquitous Ninth symphony.
A 200+ amateur chorus chorus accompanied soloists in an infectious rendition of Beethoven's Ninth at Tokyo's Mitsukoshi department store earlier today.
Celebrating their 24th annual performance, we could easily argue that the Japanese weren't the first to mix classical music with the iconic mall setting.
During his 1904 American tour in New York City, Richard Strauss himself conducted concerts at the famous Wanamaker's, one of the first department stores in the USA -- a practice that horrified those boring Europeans but actually brought fine, fine music to the US public way before the heroic maestro Toscanini thankfully brought classical music to the North American masses. Oh hay...one hundred years later, we Americans have proudly replaced Strauss with Taylor Swift and Hannah Montana (who, in fairness, all look better on a plasma screen than that old balding half-a$$ed Nazi who played Wanamaker's!) .
~*~