You may have noticed that my father is not mentioned much in the pages of Piano Dance. The book is about music, and he was a supporter, but not a performer. In an era when husbands did not often encourage their wives’ activities outside the home, my father was very supportive of my mother’s singing. […]

Carnegie Hall This story included my first experience singing at Carnegie Hall. The hall has an interesting history, which you can read HERE. I didn’t know that the opening performance of the hall in 1891 was directed by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky himself. Also interesting is that the hall was scheduled to be torn down in […]

There is an excellent biography of Ozawa at https://biography.yourdictionary.com/seiji-ozawa. He was an amazing talent, who worked extremely hard, contributing to the world’s music. His commitment was obvious. Early in his career, he was criticized for having ascended so quickly that he was not conversant with the entirety of orchestral classical music. He worked for years […]

Pavarotti was 6’2″, but he seemed to not be very tall, as he was extremely wide and solid as a brick. Between scenes of the opera, he would consult with a coach in the side wings of the stage. The coach would express himself in a very animated manner, and strike Pavarotti on the chest […]

Chapter 15 tells the story of my mother and aunt attending the Chorus Pro Musica performance at Carnegie Hall. I had sung with the chorus for years in Boston, but the trip from Delaware was too long for my mother to attend any of the performances. We were both pretty excited, then, that she could […]

At the end of Chapter 16, I made a reference to a passage in Hamlet, that I will discuss in a minute. My knowledge of that passage came as a result of being in a production of Hamlet by the Brandywiners at Longwood Gardens, in southeastern Pennsylvania in 1971. The Brandywiners have put on a […]

Chapter 17 was about a single performance of Amahl and the Night Visitors in 1980. The opera was written by Gian Carlo Menotti in 1951, and was the dominant holiday TV drama until 1966. Menotti had moved on to produce an enormous quantity of work by that time. He was the predominant opera composer of […]

Chapter 18 tells of an ill-fated performance by the San Jose Symphony. After reading the story, a prominent music educator asked me to tell him what happened as a result of this performance. The answer requires a little background information about the San Jose Symphony and the times.   San Jose is located in the […]

Chapter 19 described a morning that I spent preparing a wreck of a piano for use during filming of a TV program. At the end of the story, I told of how I wished I had memorized “There’s no Business like Show Business” so I could could play it with a lot of performers around […]

Chapter 20 tells of evaluating and tuning Walt Disney’s piano on several occasions. Each occasion was for Richard Sherman to play the piano. Richard and his brother Robert wrote the music for numerous Disney songs, notably the songs for Mary Poppins. There is a wonderful movie called Saving Mr. Banks, which is the back story […]