This weekend will be the season opening of Orange County’s  Pacific Symphony Orchestra, considered one of the top regional orchestra’s in the country. On the program is Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, Jon Kimura Parker, soloist. Tchaikovsky was a genius and his music is immortal. A radio announcer said that “Russian music, like Russian literature, is always excited about something.”  That is true and Tchaikovsky’s music is often excited, but also it can be romantic and sweet. For all the excitement, he is also known for his love of the waltz tempo in his symphony and ballet music.

My photo above is of his desk in his home in Klin, north of Moscow. I visited once there and it was an experience. At this desk in 1893, he left the unfinished composition of his Third Piano Concerto, to go to Saint Petersburg to conduct the premier of his famous Sixth Symphony, It was a flop. Depressed about this, and some other things, he died a few days later from cholera, the records show. What a loss, but he was at his peak, and we have it all to enjoy today. Such a great man.

Buy here  “Walking on Ice, An American Businessman in Russia”

What magic a photo is! It captures a scene, a sight, an expression, a moment in time and we keep it in some way to revisit, to explain, to maybe prove something. In this case it is the desk of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky at his last home in Klin, north of Moscow. At that desk the composer wrote his last notes of music, the unfinished Third Piano Concerto, then left on the midnight train to Saint Petersburg to conduct his last, the Sixth Symphony, and to die. He left us on November 6, 1893 (new calendar).  But we have him with us forever, immortal.

In my world travels over the years, I usually had a camera. but I remember so well the shots I missed–either no camera or no opportunity. Out the car window on a Malaysian country road, dodging the bicycles, was this sight of a worn square brown building with six windows, the whole building side a faded scene which was once a Coca-Cola ad.  And out of the top left window, some thrity feet above the rocky ground, dangled the bare legs of a boy. He looked natural there, unconcerned, in a little escape from the heat of the room beyond him. And we drove on. Pictures in the camera of the mind last just as long, maybe longer 

See the photos on this web site, a few of the thousands I have taken around the globe. Buy here  “Walking on Ice, An American Businessman in Russia”