Musings on ballet, classical music, the violin, and life
Concerts, recordings, reviews, musings, you name it. I’m a lifelong classical music fan.
I’m a big fan of the San Francisco Ballet’s Nutcracker (and just reviewed a 2021 performance for Bachtrack HERE) but this year I’m proposing a different Nutcracker must-see. My classical music readers will be happy to hear I’m favoring an orchestral performance of Tchaikovsky’s score this time, and not the ballet. And yet, fear not, … Read more
You’ve quite possibly seen a copy of “Isle of the Dead,” a painting by Swiss symbolist artist, Arnold Böcklin. The dreamy, haunting portrait depicts a small rowboat traversing a lake. In the boat a figure shrouded in white stands, transporting a draped coffin, as the rower behind steers the boat to shore, a rocky island … Read more
Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis is gorgeous, ethereal and, I came to discover, difficult to capture in words. Out for dinner the other night, I confessed to my husband that I was having trouble getting my essay about it off the ground. It was so clear in my mind, the … Read more
Ralph Vaughan Williams’s “The Lark Ascending” falls into that delicious category for me, of classical pieces I discover upon awakening. On weekdays I set my iPad alarm to an HD classical station and at 4:06am the music pierces my dreams, awakening me in the kindest of ways (until the “real” alarm blasts me out of … Read more
I don’t consider myself to be someone easily seduced, much less by Death, but Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” sears a haunting image on my psyche that has few equals in music. (One of them being, ironically, another Schubert piece, his Impromptu No. 3 that I blogged about HERE. And, okay, Debussy’s “Afternoon of a … Read more