Will it cheer you up to know that it started out as an English Country Dance tune called “The Country Courtship” , also often used for Rapper Dances … 
And the audience is clapping off-rhythm, too. That’s the whole package right there.
Yes. I just find that third line so comparatively weak.
As in the vid, it’s reliably found most often in a church service context, whereas the other (which Rieu used) lends itself to wider secular appreciation in a way that the other can’t. It could be that what I call the “church version” is what it is, simply because its more constrained structure ensures that a congregation can better hold its unity when singing it > en masse> . One is tempted to assume that the church version is the older one, but I don’t have the scholarship to take that step. Suffice it to say it’s not the version I pick whenever I’ve played the tune.
I’ve wondered if it’s more a geographical thing because I’d known the version you and I prefer for donkey’s years before becoming aware of the other. I can’t really see one as more or less constrained, but do find one more organic. On which note you could argue that we’ve just decided ‘how it goes’ from strong first impressions, but I’d counter that my preference has deeper roots in musical logic…
You could be spot-on, there; I haven’t gone so far as to assume that the “church version” is a distinctly American one, but OTOH I wouldn’t be surprised, either.
I get what you’re saying. But the “church version” always sounds stiff-starched and overly prim to me, as if to be consciously antiseptic - Heaven forfend we should inadvertently loosen up - hence my use of the word “constrained”. It’s a subjective thing, I guess.
Christ! Hasn’t Ireland suffered enough?
Oh, there’s way more where that came from. 
Well, well, well . . .
I guess some music is more equal than others . . . but hey, everyone’s entitled to their opinion.
True, the whistling was not trad. But it was musical + expressive in it’s own way.
Thank you for enlarging my vocabulary !
I had no idea it was a regular item. Sheltered life I guess.
Seriously ? In a group/concert setting ? Such a beautiful piece of music, with it’s full message of personal pain + reconciliation?
After all, Amazing Grace is so widely+well known, each person has their own “internal” version of it. That version includes what it sounded like as well as all the other “meanings” that come from context (e.g. funerals, church services, …). Hearing a version, any version, brings that all back.
I’m not surprised one bit at the waterworks. I wish I had been there.
When I grow up, I hope to be able to ornament + twiddle at will the way Rieu whistler did. Along with trad too.
best fishes,
trill
Neither do I, but if you look at the tune as written in the Lucius Chapin manuscript in the article you linked to, his version seems to be somewhere halfway between the two:
B2 | d4 Bd | G4
Christ! Hasn’t Ireland suffered enough?
Rieu’s orchestra is a sort of novelty act with a repertoire mainly consisting of Vienna Waltzes. Strauss, a speciality. The whole dress up vibe and jollity of it is excruciating to some, a large audience loves it. And he plays to that audience by throwing in bits of this and that, guests and other music that may appeal. A bit like the latter day Chieftains, I nearly said. With, as Nano said, buckets of mawk and plastering it on rather thickly.
He seems to enjoy the show and all the trappings, lives in a castle and some twenty five years ago bought a Strad that he sold soon afterward, some suggesting he couldn’t quite handle it (but that may have been just the begrudgers talking). He’s a showman, anyway. and likes the shiny, blingy things.
Andre Rieu is the Thomas Kinkade of music. https://thomaskinkade.com/
Bathos!
My late father in law liked him. I remember watching some youtube clip of Rieu with him and thinking “pull yourself together man!”
I’ve never come across Thomas Kinkade. Now I’ve looked, it wouldn’t appear to be my thing.
Just looked up Kinkade. Obviously, plenty of talent. He has a book “Billion Dollar Painter”. I gather he made a fortune.
I had a good friend who was a potter. Gifted artist. Cool forms. But, when it came to survival of the business, she had two rules: bright colors and easily recognized forms. Perhaps there’s a parallel.
There are people like that in any endeavour. We could have fun naming more of them, although we’d have to stay away from politics and religion. I’m not sure Charles Dickens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, or even William Shakespeare, were aiming much higher than that when they were alive, although each did manage a higher much standard.
Yes Kinkade made a fortune but filed for bankruptcy, and there were accusations of swindling involving the franchising of his name and signed prints. Major drinking problem, expensive girlfriend, angry wife.
The “problem” with Kinkade is the same IMHO as Andre Reiu: bathetic overstatement. Kinkade’s cottages scream COZY!!! or QUIET COUNTRY LANE!!!
Also people point out that all his building appear to be on fire, the people in them surely burned to death, which is why there are never any people, and it’s often, as in the image linked simultaneously autumn, with red foliage, and spring, with spring flowers, and though the sun is setting the shadows are all directly above as at noon, and in the example I posted who the hell would build a house on that spot and how long would it last? Stare at a Kinkade painting and it quickly gets weird: the dark dark shadows, the impossible landscapes, the furnace like interiors.
Everything is overstated: everything is bathos: romanticism in the Edgar Allen Poe sense: deranged.
Reiu has the same determination to wildly overstate every good thing
Sorry to be picky, but it’s Rieu.
Oh, stop bothering us with practicalities. I’m basking in the glowing dream of it.
Has anybody noticed the thin but consolidated wisps of smoke coming out of both chimneys? That’s a physical impossibility. Nice small carbon footprint, though.
It’s sort of how I imagine Mr. Gumby’s house.
It’s a bit far afield but at the height of Kinkade’s fame two Russian artists hired a marketing firm to ask Americans what they wanted in a painting–what they liked and didn’t like. They came up with “america’s
most wanted painting:”
They did the same survey for a number of other countries and you can see the results here:
Art, schmart. That’s visual gibberish. But at least American deer can walk on water.
Nice hovel you have there.