In Popular Culture
- An excerpt from this piece was featured in the 2004 film Palindromes.
- This piece was also further popularized among many Americans when it was used as the theme to Orson Welles's famous radio series, The Mercury Theatre on the Air. The Concerto came to be associated with Welles throughout his career and was often played when introducing him as a guest on both radio and television. The main theme was also made into a popular song titled Tonight We Love, by bandleader Freddy Martin in 1941.
- The opening bars of the concerto were played in a Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch in which a pianist (who is said to be Sviatoslav Richter) struggles, like Harry Houdini, to escape from a locked bag and other restraints, but is nevertheless able to pound away at the keyboard. It was also played by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra while it went to the bathroom.
- It was used during the final leg of the Olympic torch relay during the Opening Ceremonies of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, Soviet Union.
- The concerto is used for the opening credits of 1941's The Great Lie, and is played by Mary Astor's character Sandra Kovak at the end of the movie.
- The concerto was played by classical pianist and comedian Oscar Levant backed with a full symphony orchestra in the 1949 MGM musical film The Barkleys of Broadway.
- Liberace's version of the concerto is played in the 1990 film Misery.
Read more about this topic: Piano Concerto No. 1 (Tchaikovsky)
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture is seductive; high culture is imperious.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead-drunk in the street, carried to the duke’s house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke’s bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason and finds himself a true prince.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)