Early piano (perhaps played in the time of Schumann or Grieg), photo by Sally Buffington

Former model, brilliant musician, and passionate animal lover describe and define only one woman—the lovely Helene Grimaud. A gifted pianist with a successful performing career, she founded the Wolf Conservation Center in South Salem, New York, and currently divides her time between the two commitments.

Born in Aix-en-Provence, France, Grimaud received her music education at the Conservatoire de Paris. I have selected her recording of the “Piano Concerto in A minor” by Robert Schumann because the performance offers definitive Grimaud. The work, completed in 1845 and the composer’s only piano concerto, is an ideal musical canvas for Grimaud’s intensity, poetic sensitivity to dynamic color, and subtle nuance.
 

Equally at home on the concert stage singing the early American folk song “Beautiful Dreamer” by nineteeth-century composer Stephen Foster and in the world of opera as Adalgisa in Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma (1831), the great American mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne hails from Bradford, Pennsylvania. Her distinctive, rich, and creamy voice glows in the Foster, and the technical demands of the operatic literature are easily met by her remarkable vocal facility in the Bellini. She is well known for her interpretation of Adalgisa in performance with soprano Joan Sutherland in the opera’s title role.

The extraordinary Julia Fischer was born in Munich, Germany, in 1983. A rare musician who is equally gifted as a violinist and pianist, she is a remarkably versatile virtuoso on both instruments. She began her music education at the Leopold Mozart Conservatory in Augsburg and subsequently was admitted to the Munich University of Music and Performing Arts at the age of nine. 

Internationally prominent and active as both soloist and chamber ensemble performer, Fischer is one of the finest musicians of her generation, with deep musical sensibilities and brilliant technical facility. Her playing exudes energy and joy—qualities fully evident in  her performances of the Brahms D major violin concerto and the Grieg piano concerto that I have selected.

Night at the Musée d’Orsay: Poems of Paris & Other Great European Cities

by Judy Wells

Night at the Musée d’Orsay: Poems of Paris & Other Great European Cities is a vibrant memoir of travel poems centering on Judy Wells’ appreciation of well-known European painters, architects, writers, and musicians associated with great European cities. Her poems explore artists in France, Italy, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Spain, from Van Gogh, Chagall, Matisse, and Balzac in Paris, to Velázquez and Goya in Madrid, and Gaudí in Barcelona.

Wells interweaves her own personal life into her poems, which illustrate her creative responses to her travels at different times—from young adult in France to older woman confronting aging in Barcelona. Her poetry encompasses various poetic styles—lyric, narrative, and surprisingly for a book on European travels, haiku.

Night at the Musée d’Orsay
 
If the curators knew I, a moth, was in the Van Gogh room
they’d be shocked!
But what do they expect—
I love light and I’m particularly
attracted to a painting
of stars—globs of light
reflected in a river.
 
I’ve sat on top of these yellow blobs
and survived though I can feel
the heat of these stars
right through the paint.
Light bulbs are cold by comparison
though I’m not singed by Van Gogh.
I’m transformed and waves of ecstasy
wander through my wings.
 
I rest on Van Gogh’s stars all night.
In the morning I flit to a cottage
and settle on a deep blue iris.
The tourists think I’m part of the painting.
I laugh. I’m just a moth
with grand taste.

Available from Amazon, Bookshop.org, and www.regentpress.net

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