Skip to main content

Revisit Six of Elton John’s Most Iconic Concerts, Streaming in Their Entirety for 72 Hours

Just as Bohemian Rhapsody introduced Freddy Mercury to an unsuspecting generation of young fans, last year’s Elton John biopic, Rocketman, has netted its subject a host of fresh admirers.

John's newest fans were born into a far different world than the one that was astounded when he declared, in a 1976 interview with Rolling Stone, that he was bisexual.

Now a knight (the first openly gay musician to be so anointed), Sir Elton is using his enormous public platform to encourage youth who may be struggling with their sexuality or gender identity and to end the global AIDS epidemic.

To date, the Elton John AIDS Foundation has raised over $450,000,000 to support HIV-related programs in fifty-five countries, and is now doubling down with coronavirus relief efforts for the population it has long served.

To that end, Sir Elton is revisiting six of his most iconic performances over the last half-century, posting a concert in its entirety to his Youtube channel every week in hope that viewers will be moved to make a donation at concert's end.

(As further incentive, an anonymous supporter has pledged to match donations up to $250,000.)

Each concert streams for 72 hours, but clips of individual songs linger longer.

Last week the Classic Concert Series turned the dial back 30 years to find Sir Elton playing a 1st-century Roman amphitheater—Italy’s Arena di Verona—as part of his 130-show Reg Strikes Back tour. His interplay with singers Mortonette Jenkins, Marlena Jeter, and Kudisan Kai during an 8-minute gospel-tinged spin on “Sad Songs (Say So Much)," above, is a highlight of the 22-song set.

The series kicked off at the Playhouse Theater in Edinburgh in 1976 as "Don’t Go Breaking My Heart" was topping the charts, and continues to the Sydney Entertainment Center ten years further on, when Sir Elton defied doctor's orders, performing despite vocal nodules.

On July 24, John takes us along to Rio’s Estadio Do Flamengo when the release of 1995’s Made In England prompted his first ever tour of Brazil.

The following week, we'll enter the 21st-century with a pitstop at Madison Square Garden before the series comes to a close at the Great Amphitheater in Ephesus, Turkey.

Watch Elton John’s Classic Concert Series on his Youtube channel, and even though it's not obligatory,  seek out the blue donation button that appears on every post. You can also make a tax deductible donation via the Elton John AIDS Foundation's website.

Related Content: 

Elton John Proves He Can Turn any Text into a Song: Watch Him Improvise with Lines from Henrik Ibsen’s Play, Peer Gynt

Elton John Takes Us Through the Creative Process of His Early Hit “Tiny Dancer” (1970)

Elton John Sings His Classic Hit ‘Your Song’ Through the Years

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

Revisit Six of Elton John’s Most Iconic Concerts, Streaming in Their Entirety for 72 Hours is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/2Ef3MDA
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

Howard Zinn’s Recommended Reading List for Activists Who Want to Change the World

Image by via Wikimedia Commons Back in college, I spotted A People’s History of the United States   in the bags and on the bookshelves of many a fellow undergraduate. By that time, Howard Zinn’s alternative telling of the American story had been popular reading material for a couple of decades, just as it presumably remains a couple more decades on. Even now, a dozen years after Zinn’s death, his ideas about how to approach U.S. history through non-standard points of view remain widely influential. Just last month, Radical Reads featured the reading list he originally drew up for the  Socialist Worker , pitched at “activists interested in making their own history.” Zinn’s recommendations naturally include the work of other historians, from Gary Nash’s Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America (“a pioneering work of ‘multiculturalism’ dealing with racial interactions in the colonial period”) to Vincent Harding’s There Is a River: The Black Struggle for ...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more