Musings on ballet, classical music, the violin, and life
Concerts, recordings, reviews, musings, you name it. I’m a lifelong classical music fan.
I was thrown back in time recently, through music, while attending the San Francisco Symphony. The piece in question was a perennial crowd-pleasing warhorse, Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5. Now, if you’re thinking, “been there, done that,” yeah, so was I. I’d chosen the concert not for the Tchaikovsky but for the opening work, Grieg’s Piano … Read more
No piece of classical music grips my ballet-dancer’s imagination like Aram Khachaturian’s “Waltz” from his Masquerade suite. Like his Piano Concerto that I blogged about HERE in 2017, it doesn’t start so much as drop the listener smack into a musical extravaganza, where the lines between listener and music have been erased and, oh Lord, … Read more
My return to Africa — if only in my mind — started early one morning last week in the most curious of places: my local classical music station. Something wonderful was playing, a suite of five movements, each one telling its own story in a distinctive musical voice. But who was it? I discerned a … Read more
As a lifelong Catholic, I’ve always taken Holy Week seriously in a personal way, and the reading of The Passion on Palm Sunday always deeply affects me. You’d think I’d never heard the story before, of Jesus’s triumphant arrival into Jerusalem, his Last Supper, praying in the garden of Gethsemane, his betrayal by one of … Read more
Yuja Wang was the star we’d all come to see at San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall last Sunday afternoon. A change in programming had rewarded us in dividends; she’d be performing not just one but two piano concertos. For most of the audience, I’m guessing, it was Ravel’s intense Piano Concerto for the Left Hand … Read more