My stand partner for twenty years in the Minnesota Orchestra was another veteran, Robert Jamieson. He was the polar opposite of aggressive, gruff and passionate Shirley Tabachnick. Jamieson was a stoic and private gentleman of Scottish heritage. He had been

When I get back to Hong Kong next week, I am very much looking forward to a special lunch. An internationally renowned chef has opened his own restaurant! I can already tell you that the food will be beyond delicious

We all know what a piano looks like – large and square, if it’s an upright; or large and black, if it’s a concert grand. Yet, through the years, piano makers have done many explorations into the design of piano

Two visiting orchestras will bring a lot of Tchaikovsky to Guangzhou this year, with appearances by the St. Petersburg Philharmonic under Yuri Temirkanov and the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Vassily Sinaisky. Both conductors are Russian, Temirkanov has led the St.

We went to a performance recently of Orff’s Carmina Burana and really welcomed the rare chance to hear a performance of the work on stage. This is a work that is more heard on the radio or as part of

If you listen to Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” from the Nutcracker, you are acutely aware of a silvery, ethereal and otherworldly sound coming from the orchestra. That sound, similar to that of the glockenspiel—a percussion instrument composed

The time you spend with a stand partner in an orchestra frequently exceeds the time you spend with your spouse. I had three long-term stand partners all vastly different in approaches. My first stand partner was the veteran and irascible

It’s hard to imagine someone who called the music of Kurt Weill (the composer of ‘Mack the Knife’) ‘drivel’ eventually writing musicals and popular songs himself. Yet for Marc Blitzstein, this huge shift in aesthetic was just the start –