Musings on ballet, classical music, the violin, and life
The Classical GirlFive free books through Thanksgiving Day! Scroll down for links. You might notice more white space on this blog. Less words. That’s on purpose. Space feels great. It’s a hard commodity to come by as we approach the holidays and the end of the year. Everything gets squeezed in, condensed. More food … Read more
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
Celebrating the 10-year anniversary of the Ballet Theatre Chronicles! Book 1, Off Balance and the final book, Other Stages, are only 99 cents. Books 2 and 3, Outside the Limelight and Ballet Orphans are only $2.99. Just click on their titles! Everyone’s asking: will there be a World Ballet Day in 2025? On October 16th, the answer became YES!! Please join me … 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