Welcoming Joan Behrens-Bergman
Early piano (perhaps played in the time of Schumann or Grieg), photo by Sally Buffington
Our Guest Editor’s Music Picks
Helene Grimaud
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.
Marilyn Horne
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.
Julia Fischer
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.
How can we find meaning in the face of aging, illness, and the inevitability of death? How can we respond to the double plague of a fierce pandemic and a divided society?
The keenly observant and urgent poems of The Holy & Broken Bliss are grounded in daily existence, human tenderness, the rituals of a long marriage, and the poet's ongoing spiritual quest. In the middle of a world that seems to be breaking down into suffering and anger, the spare and direct lines of these poems, surrounded by silence, offer a kind of healing. The poems ask us to consider what living looks like inside of ongoing misery (misery we often are responsible for making and accept-ing). They call us to ask ourselves how we locate joy and even laughter when despair is ever-present.
The Holy & Broken Bliss contemplates free will, autonomy, self-control, the commodification of ourselves, and our desires for vengeance, satia- tion, rage, and acknowledgment of our collective sicknesses, along with the sacred possibilities of love, communication with nature, the power of art, and the "need to praise."
"Ostriker confronts the intricate dance between spiritual despair and revelatory beauty in her ethereal 17th collection. ... [The Holy & Broken Bliss] resonates long after the final page, reminding readers that even in a fractured, plague-stricken world, there is still a living, breathing force within all things."
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
Available from Alice James Books, Amazon or Bookshop
Joan Behrens-Bergman has enjoyed a distinguished career as teacher, administrator, and performer. Executive Director of the Hoff-Barthelson Music School in Scarsdale, New York (1991-2017), she is a former piano and piano pedagogy faculty member of the Mannes College of Music College Division in New York City, where she was the director of the Conservatory’s Preparatory Division for eight years. She has appeared as piano soloist in recitals, guest artist with orchestras, pianist/lecturer on live radio broadcasts—and is known worldwide for her inspiring master classes, as well as her pedagogy seminars for teachers. She is listed in Who’s Who Among America’s Teachers.
Sally Buffington is a writer and photographer and author of a memoir A Place Like This: Finding Myself In a Cape Cod House. She writes lyrically and imaginatively about food, place, books, nature, memory, and photography. To see more of her work, go to