Musings on ballet, classical music, the violin, and life
Concerts, recordings, reviews, musings, you name it. I’m a lifelong classical music fan.
Check out my latest review of a stunning 2/16/25 Yuja performance HERE. The thing is, I didn’t know about the “very short/tight/colorful dress” business before Yuja Wang’s May 2014 performance with the San Francisco Symphony. I’d seen and enjoyed her performance in 2012, here at Davies Hall, when she played Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto and blew … Read more
I fell in love with Bizet’s opera Carmen, early in my college days. At first it was only the orchestral score, via cassette. The music was imbued with such story on its own, so delicious that I could sit on the frayed couch in my ratty apartment, eyes shut, and listen to the recording … Read more
It was a night for music lovers, not just ballet lovers, last Saturday at the San Francisco Ballet. Beethoven’s Piano Trio no. 1, Saint Saens’ Symphony no. 2 (injected with the sublime 2nd movement from his Symphony no. 3) and Stravinsky’s iconic The Rite of Spring. We are so fortunate, we of the San Francisco … Read more
A revised version of this appeared at Violinist.com in 2008 As the story has it, when Hungarian-born 20th century composer Franz Schmidt received the news in 1932 that his beloved daughter and only child, Emma, had died in childbirth, it was just prior to his setting to work on his Symphony no. 4 in C … Read more
One doesn’t think of the career of a professional violinist as being fraught with peril and high drama, but on the night of January 27th, violinist Frank Almond, concertmaster of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and founder of the popular “Frankly Music” series, was leaving a chamber music performance in Wisconsin when a stranger approached him … Read more