Mussorgsky’s spooky “Night on Bald Mountain”

    It’s October, and the urge for theatrical, spooky music always arises for me right about this time. Cue a visit to the blog I wrote years back, “Ten Spooky Classical Faves for Halloween.” Each year, it seems, I have a different relationship with the music and its composers. This year, I’m taking a … Read more

World Ballet Day 2024

  World Ballet Day 2024 is … … Sadly, not going to happen. Following is news from the official World Ballet Day site today, September 23, 2024:  After 10 fantastic years of bringing together audiences around the globe on World Ballet Day, The Australian Ballet, The Royal Ballet, and San Francisco Ballet have decided to … Read more

Dukas and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

Ask someone who’s seen the 1940 animated film, Fantasia, which piece they best remember, and the majority will respond with, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” or “the one with Mickey Mouse.” (Runners up might include Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue,” Tchaikovsky’s “Waltz of the Flowers,” or Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain,” but that’s a blog for another time.) … Read more

More things my cats have taught me about ballet

I wrote my first post on this in 2013, mere months after I’d started my blog. I didn’t have a lot of posts or readers back then. I’d feel lucky to get twenty views a day, and I’d savor that number, cheering when it rose to thirty and feeling teary when it dropped to ten … Read more

Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal “Erwartung” – Stay or Go?

I’ve never attended the symphony before with the sense that I might not stay for the program’s second half, but that was my thinking when I entered San Francisco Symphony’s Davies Hall on a recent Sunday afternoon. The first of the program’s two semi-staged works was Ravel’s Ma Mère l’Oye (“Mother Goose”) featuring dancers from … Read more