Terez Rose is a ballet and classical music critic, who blogs regularly on her site, The Classical Girl. Her work has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Literary Mama, Espresso Fiction, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Ms. Rose is also the author of Off Balance and Outside the Limelight.
Oh, the emotional images Schubert stirs within me. A whiff of my childhood, dusk on a wintery Sunday, when the younger, chilled me has gone inside and Mom's got a roast cooking in the oven, filling the air with an intoxicating aroma and a sense of security...
It’s Halloween, and you’re looking for that perfect, spooky Halloween music that’s a little more sophisticated than “The Monster Mash” and “Thriller” and “Werewolves of London.” Look no further, friends. I’ve done my own hopping around...
Maurice Ravel
I suppose it’s not all that curious. If you are a concert pianist and your right arm is a casualty in World War I, afterwards you have two options. One: give up your music career...
With its driving rhythms, distinct flavors, accessibility, and charm, Aram Khachaturian's piano concerto was an instant success in 1936. Have no doubt, it’s a sizzler. It’s decisive, flamboyant, and arrives and departs in a pyrotechnic dazzle...
Aram Khachaturian
Warning: do not attempt to drive or operate heavy machinery while listening to Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade for the first time. Said composition is known to have caused feelings of extreme uplift, a dreamlike state, mild disorientation and a disassociation with...
The fun thing about really getting to know the violin concerto repertoire is that there are always more treasures to discover...
The violin concerto repertoire is so rich and satisfying, I’m embarrassed to admit that, prior to becoming...
Franz Schmidt's lament makes grief beautiful. It elevates it to something irreproachable, like snow on a mountain peak that, when you’re stumbling around in it, stings and chills and makes you lose your footing, but from the distance, oh, the inexpressible beauty...
There’s something about Frédéric François Chopin that puts him and his music in a category of its own. Born in Poland, a child prodigy on the piano, Chopin trained in Warsaw, and left Poland at age twenty. By twenty-one, he was settled in Paris and quickly became Someone Worth...
Back in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, a superstition developed in the classical music world that prophesied the Ninth would be a composer’s last symphony. Arnold Schoenberg summed it up in an eloquent fashion, stating that “he who wants...
The problem with poor Max Bruch was that he was born too late. What he produced is art that seems to give off an invisible radiance, one you can feel on your flushed cheeks, deep within your heart as you listen. This is art that got overlooked...
Easter likely hadn’t been on Edward Elgar’s mind when he wrote his Enigma Variations, yet this wondrous, utterly memorable piece conjures up a rush of powerful spirituality, a sense of Easter Sunday grandeur. It is most decidedly “death has been conquered; arise and go forth” music...
Claude Debussy's "Afternoon of a Faun" delivers volumes of sensation. Languor, sensuality, euphoria, curiosity, an awareness of the exotic. You are flung back to your own childhood, your adolescence, all awash in new experiences, colors, sensations. For ten fleeting minutes, you let the music cradle you, transport...
Camille Saint-Saëns' Symphony No. 3 has so many distinct and wonderful flavors, it just amazes me. And the first movement is so vibrant, unexpected, cinematic. The second movement utterly transports me...
Being haunted by music sounds like...
Many classical music purists today consider Sergei Rachmaninoff’s music to be excessively sentimental, admittedly lush but too similar-sounding once you’ve heard one concerto. But is this a fair assessment?...
Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2, Op 18...
