Jonathan Still, ballet pianist
Music, dance, IT, trivia. Not necessarily in that order.
Time signatures in ballet class: don’t get precious about them There’s no polite way to say this—pianists, don’t get pissy about time signatures in ballet class. In other words, if…
Searching for petit allegro music “There are two parts of the class where you need more music,” the late Anatoli Grigoriev said to me after I’d played for him a…
Nine times out of ten, the secret of being a good dance pianist is to concentrate on what your left hand is doing rather than your right. As pianists, we…
Sorry to hear that Leo Kersley, dancer and ballet teacher, and author of my favourite ballet dictionary, died yesterday, aged 92. I would love to have met him. There are…
I think most people know that there are quite a few musical borrowings in the Nutcracker, and that Tchaikovsky got the theme for the Arabian from somewhere – a Georgian…
French revolutionary musical borrowings in The Nutcracker —wny? As I said in my last post, where I think I’ve discovered a French counter-revolutionary song as a source for one of…