Advent 3: On being too ‘musical’
In the summer of 2000, Christopher Hampson (a.k.a. Chris in this blog elsewhere) created a five-minute graduation-day piece for the final year students at the RAD called Finale, for which…
Advent 2: The chord game
Prokofiev’s March from the Love for Three Oranges strictly speaking doesn’t end at the end of its first 16 counts, but it has all the gestures of a perfect cadence…
Advent 1: Solving musical problems
The opening of Mark Morris’s Drink to me only with thine eyes, choreographed to piano etudes by Virgil Thomson begins with a bizarre, meandering bitonal extravagance called Chromatic Double Harmonies…
Advent
It’s that time of year again. I didn’t stir up any puddings on this, stir-up-sunday, much as I would have liked, but I have decided what my advent calendar will…
Romeo & Juliet & Mark Morris at the Barbican
On Wednesday, legged it down to the Barbican to see Mark Morris’s R&J, with the score unearthed by the incredible Simon Morrison – not just ‘a Princeton music professor’ as…
PIrouettes (or other things): Grande valse from Cinderella Act II
This is day 25 in my 2007 Advent Calendar. This year, I’m giving the story behind some of the music that I’ve collected for ballet classes. All the pieces are…