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.
Mother-Daughter Banquet untangles the knot of memory and finds a thread of love and reconciliation.
After losing her mother at the age of nine, Alice Bloch becomes a surrogate mother to her four younger siblings, while a formidable triumvirate of grandmother, stepmother, and aunt step into the maternal role to fill the void for Bloch herself, guiding her development as woman and writer. Diving deep into her memories of growing up as a Jewish lesbian in mid-twentieth century Ohio, Bloch brings us universal truths about the mother-daughter bond.
"Compelling, provocative, and above all else, completely honest, the four unique mothers who inhabit these pages will stay with the reader long after the last page has been turned."
"I found myself laughing out loud on one page and teary-eyed on the next.... These stories are poignant, funny, and captivating." - Lillian Faderman, author of Naked in the Promised Land and My Mother’s Wars Available from Minerva Rising Press, from Amazon, Bookshop.org, or from your independent bookstore.
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