Actually they did this on Christmas Day, but it's related...

On a happier note, the last movement of the Bernstein "Ode to Freedom" version of Beethoven's 9th can be found here.

Presentism and the Berlin Wall

There's no point going into great depth about the historic importance of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Empire and so on and so forth, as that has been done better elsewhere. And while it's easy to rail against the human obsession with dates, anniversaries and so on, to do is ultimately to be a hypocrite, because we all do it*... and it's wrong to do so, because of its importance in keeping the historical memory of important events alive. So I'll pick up on something else - the disappointing tinge of presentism to much of the coverage (in Britain anyway) of the anniversary of the Fall of the Wall. If you'd only watched the BBC coverage of the marking of the event earlier and knew little else about it, you could be forgiven for assuming that the real significance of the Fall of the Wall was that it ultimately allowed Angela Merkel to become the Chancellor of a united Germany. At its most absurd, it almost seemed as though the journalists commenting on proceedings believed that Merkel was a significant figure in East Germany at the time or even some kind of resistence leader (which is nonsense - she, like the overwhelming majority of Ossies, made her own private compromises with the regime in order to pursue her career and to get on with her life). It is almost as though the British media is incapable of understanding the historic importance of anything unless it can be placed in a comfortable and easy-to-understand contemporary framework.

*Though it's certainly legitimate to rail against the tendency to be so mindlessly and utterly obsessed with such things as the media tends to be. Though quite futile.