Posted inMusic

Hibernation Breaks

For all its vaunted pomp and first-tier-in-the-new-year position on the calendar, January is a pretty beige and uninspiring month here in the Northern Hemisphere. All through December it comes rushing up the stairs, hitting each landing on the way up like a tensioning string, only to knock forcefully on the protagonist’s door to deliver the […]

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Christmases Merry, White and Blue

That juggernaut called the holidays has arrived and so, whether we like it or not, most of the bounty of our evening’s public pleasures have been displaced in its rampaging wake. Many of you are out of town and/or neck-deep in some family indulgence, which might seem somewhere between a chore and a court order. […]

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A Cracking Good Time

When Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker debuted in St. Petersburg 126 years ago this week, it was generally considered to be a confusing and poor adaptation of the sourced Hoffmann and Dumas fairytale. The composer would die less than a year later, never knowing the heights of popularity that his work would enjoy in the middle […]

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