About Terez Rose

Terez Rose is a ballet and classical music critic, who blogs regularly on her site, The Classical Girl. Her essays have appeared in numerous journals, anthologies and online publications. As Terez Mertes Rose, she is the author of the Ballet Theatre Chronicles (Off Balance, Outside the Limelight, Ballet Orphans), which includes the newly released Other Stages.

10 Great Violin Concertos You Must Hear

By |2024-03-12T18:26:48-05:00March 12th, 2024|Categories: Antonin Dvorak, Audio/Video, Camille Saint-Saëns, Felix Mendelssohn, Jean Sibelius, Johannes Brahms, Music, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Robert Schumann, Timeless Essays|

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 an adult beginner on the violin in 2005, I was only familiar with a few of them. This, [...]

10 Hopelessly Romantic Classical Tunes for Valentine’s Day

By |2024-02-14T05:01:55-06:00February 13th, 2024|Categories: Audio/Video, Love, Music|

So here I am, offering you this Valentine’s Day gift, and if you scoff at the notion of celebrating the day, for “Hallmark invented it and that’s that,” consider giving these songs a listen anyway. They are delicious, uplifting, sensuous. And they won’t give you a hangover. Valentine’s Day is a funny sort of holiday. Some [...]

The Pure, True Beauty of “O Holy Night”

By |2024-02-13T05:45:56-06:00December 23rd, 2023|Categories: Audio/Video, Christmas, Music|

“O Holy Night” is a carol with a purity, beauty and a timeless message I dearly love. What I’ve always thought of as a humble yet glorious, affecting Christmas carol, turns out to have a vaguely spicy story behind it. Confession: I stopped writing this essay on “O Holy Night,” soured by something I couldn’t [...]

Creating Tchaikovsky’s First Symphony

By |2023-11-26T13:41:55-06:00November 26th, 2023|Categories: Audio/Video, Beauty, Culture, History, Music, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Timeless Essays|

Tchaikovsky's First Symphony is a delight: fresh, assured and just plain fun to listen to. The violins introduce the first movement with a shimmering, sweet tremolo, giving it a dreamy, gossamer texture, that perfectly illustrates the movement’s subtitle, “Daydreams of a Winter Journey." While a longtime fan of Tchaikovsky, I must confess that, up to a [...]

A Conductor at Twilight: Michael Tilson Thomas’ Last Days at the Podium

By |2023-11-03T05:41:08-05:00October 31st, 2023|Categories: Audio/Video, Music|

Last week, I went to see the great American conductor, Michael Tilson Thomas, who is battling an aggressive form of brain cancer, conduct Beethoven's 9th Symphony. I adore MTT not just because he’s a rock star in the classical music and a delightful and compelling orator, but because he has essentially been the host of [...]

The Dazzling Dvorak You’ve Yet to Hear

By |2023-09-08T18:16:26-05:00September 7th, 2023|Categories: Antonin Dvorak, Audio/Video, Music, Timeless Essays|

So you’re acquainted with Antonin Dvořák’s buoyant, instantly accessible “New World Symphony,” are you? And you loved it? Yay, you are part of an enormous fan club that has a spectacularly broad base of listeners. So, what other compositions by Dvořák do you like? {{Silence}} Ah. I get it. I was there too, once. But [...]

The Many Musical Moods of Edvard Grieg

By |2023-06-14T18:25:32-05:00June 14th, 2023|Categories: Audio/Video, Edvard Grieg, Music|

Oh, the many moods and stories Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg conjures in my mind, my heart. There’s the transcendent “Morning Mood” from his Peer Gynt Suite, the haunting yet hopeful “Last Spring.” I’ve sat in my car and wept to the wintry longing in his “Nocturne.” There’s the “March of the Dwarves” that evokes a [...]

Rimsky-Korsakov’s Magical “Scheherazade”

By |2023-05-30T15:41:08-05:00May 30th, 2023|Categories: Audio/Video, Culture, History, Music, Timeless Essays|

Shut your eyes as you listen to “Scheherazade,” and the mind fills with vivid images: a turbulent ocean, eighteenth-century clipper ships with billowing sails, sailors and dashing sea captains saving the day. Musical colors and textures alert you, seduce you: the booming, ominous tones from the brass section (a tyrannizing Sultan) and the sweetest, most delicate violin [...]

Mystery Revealed: Schubert’s Impromptu No. 3 in G-flat

By |2023-01-30T17:25:31-06:00January 30th, 2023|Categories: Audio/Video, Beauty, Culture, Franz Schubert, Music, Timeless Essays|

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. Tell me if this has ever happened to [...]

César Franck’s Soaring Symphony in D Minor

By |2022-12-10T10:04:00-06:00December 9th, 2022|Categories: Audio/Video, Music|

César Franck is one of those 19th-century composers who deserves to be much better known. I’ve been listening to his extraordinary Symphony in D minor for more than 20 years and knew I loved it, but I couldn’t tell you why until my recent research on him and his music. Many of us have been in [...]

Gustav Mahler & the Curse of the Ninth Symphony

By |2022-07-06T16:15:35-05:00July 6th, 2022|Categories: Audio/Video, Culture, Gustav Mahler, History, Music, Timeless Essays|

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 to go beyond it must pass away. It seems as if something might be imparted to us [...]

Cinematic Bliss: The Korngold Violin Concerto

By |2022-06-09T17:07:42-05:00June 9th, 2022|Categories: Audio/Video, Film, Music|

Erich Wolfgang Korngold was a phenomenal composer, and his gifts for fully fleshed-out musical ideas that created cinematic moods were extraordinary. The second movement (“Romance”) of his Violin Concerto makes me think of a darkening summer evening. You know, the kind where the sun set earlier but still lends a glow to the western sky [...]

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