This absolutely fabulous song comes from the 1965 slapstick comedy film, The Great Race. I first heard it on James Galway's album, In the Pink, which features Galway playing 13 of Henry Mancini's songs.

This piece just screams fun in the middle of a gazillion notes just flying by. Filled with arpeggios, this is a workout for the fingers and requires quite a bit of precision for the song to sound really good. As with most of my arrangements, I have tried to give every part something interesting to play, with the exception of the contrabass flute and optional upright bass, which could also be played by any C instrument in the bass clef range. These lower parts are important in helping maintain good downbeats.

Scored for 5 C flutes, alto, bass, contrabass, and optional upright bass. There are 2-part divisis in flutes 1 - 4. This piece is for the more advanced flute choir and would be a great opener or encore for your recitals.

Duration: 2.75 minutes

The Pie in the Face Polka by Henry Mancini comes from the film, The Great Race that included Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, and Natalie Wood. The scene in the movie is a massive pie throwing festival where even the clean Tony Curtis gets it in the face. As you might imagine, the music is comical and fun, too. This has been set for clarinet quartet by John Gibson. (Bb Soprano 1 - 3, and bass).

I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the celebrated pianist Nicolas Horvath for enthusiastically
bringing my Debussy works to public attention in their solo piano formats, both through his recent
recitals across France and through this Naxos Grand Piano release (GP822). In some cases these are
true piano pieces (like Toomai des �l�phants), in others they are piano reductions of orchestral scores
(like F�tes galantes), while in others they are piano solos in their own right that also exist in orchestral
versions (as in the incidental music for Le Roi Lear). Needless to say, most of these tracks are world
premi�re recordings, and this is certainly true of A Night in the House of Usher and its companion piece Un Jour affreux avec Le Diable dans le beffroi (?A Dreadful Day with the Devil in the Belfry?) which I arranged specially for Nicolas in November 2018 as a virtuosic, almost Lisztian paraphrase-fantasy. To remind us of the plot as the dramatic scenes unfold, Un Jour affreux avec le Diable dans le beffroi, like the start of No-ja-li) has a narrator (spoken in French by Florient Azoulay on the Grand Piano recording):

[After an overture rising from the underworld, with a polka and a citation of a chldren?s folksong Savez vous plantez les choux?, a carillon rings out]: Hearing it, the Dutch villagers start to count, with the bells of the belfry / 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 8, 9, 11, and 12 / Perfect! / 13!?!/ The bell rang 13 times / 13! / The Devil is here where the clock should be! / Damn! / The bells are cracked. / The Devil laughs fit to burst / He pulls from the pocket of his coat, a small dancing master?s violin / ?My God!? says the devil ? and he tunes his violin slowly / The Devil leads the villagers in a fantastic and relentless jig [making jokes at the expense of concertos by Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky] / The Devil directs the villagers towards the canal ? where he jumps to the other side, laughing all the time / The villagers try to imitate him, but they fall into the water. / [In Part 2] the villagers are transported to a hedonistic and lively Italian village. They are similarly transformed: the men have crooked hats ? the women have wide open bodices! They dance a mad Tarantella / 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 13 / shouting ?Hey there! (Hola?) / Jean, the young hero, makes a fervent prayer to God against the Devil / The prayer is answered and the bell again rings normally! / The expression of the Devil changes: he shudders! / Everything goes black / The devil disappears in a brief red glow ? / And the carillon and the bells chime as usual / 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 / Perfect! / But the Devil?s grinning face ap-
pears once again where the clock should be ? briefly