Musings on ballet, classical music, the violin, and life
Concerts, recordings, reviews, musings, you name it. I’m a lifelong classical music fan.
The news is splashed all over the Internet this morning. Stolen 1696 Stradivarius worth $1.8 million, recovered by UK police in central England. The crime, three years earlier: Euston Station, London. Violinist Min-Jin Kym had stopped at a sandwich shop while inside the railway station. While in there, she was momentarily distracted by two teens. … Read more
John Cage’s organ composition “As Slow As Possible” is, at the risk of sounding obvious, intended to be played slowly. Its 1987 premier lasted twenty-nine minutes. A subsequent performance lasted seventy-one minutes. Some musicians have made it last for over eight hours. But a few years after Cage’s death in 1992, a group of musicologists, … Read more
Remember the movie Snakes on a Plane? Yeah, me neither. But let’s call this Strings on a Plane. It’s a warm afternoon in Beijing and a plane full of people are buckled in, awaiting departure that the crew can’t seem to get permission for. The plane has been grounded on the tarmac for not one, not two, … Read more
Friday night, just before 6:00pm, I was driving my son to the middle school he will be graduating from in a matter of days. Eighth grade dance night. He’s developing that closeness with his classmates, male and female alike, that I remember doing at the end of my own eighth grade year. In some ways, … Read more
Call me sentimental, but when I hear a story about a talented performer in the arts world who suffers adversity and triumphs against tremendous odds, well, it steals my heart. It gets me rallying around that person. That I should be won over by the performer’s talent, musicality, peerless technique, before learning his backstory, well, … Read more