Things are heating up for all of us as Thanksgiving approaches. Here’s what’s cooking at our “Professor Carol” house right now.
Our newest series Tour the Arts made its debut. Oh my, it was fun to tour the artistic and cultural treasures of Prague with so many of you. The next places in the series will include Berlin, Budapest, St. Petersburg, Krakow, Dresden, and the Adriatic Coast! These sessions present a way to “travel” through interesting places without leaving your kitchen table. Touring the arts this way helps adults and students make valuable connections to the history, literature, and science that they study, too.
If you haven’t seen our offering we call Composer of the Month, another surprise awaits. Here, a palate of vivid performances, master classes, mini-talks, interviews, and select biographical material is presented to bring the music of each composer to life. Composers covered thus far include Ravel, Beethoven, Bach, Rachmaninov, Schubert, Bartok, Copland, Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Mozart, Liszt, and Brahms. For November we have featured the master-musician and superstar Joseph Haydn. Can you guess who will be featured in December? Clue: Hallelujah! That’s right: George Friedrich Handel.
And, yes, A Night at the Opera continues. We have covered 17 operas in this series so far. Seventeen! When I think back to that first tentative offering of Rossini’s Cenerentola (Cinderella) (when a power outage that hit right as we approached the marvelous singing of heartthrob Juan Diego Flórez), and consider what we’ve achieved together, as a team, I am thrilled. Jump in with us, if you haven’t before, and take a seat for our next opera coming in January, our 18th selection: Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin. These webinars are free and have a strong chance of turning you into an opera fan (if you’re not already one).
Advent begins on Sunday, November 28, and I will offer our 12th Advent Calendar. This also astounds me when I remember conceiving the idea back in 2010, wondering if, possibly, such a thing might be a good idea. What a privilege it has been to share with you these daily essays and special features on the arts, history, and family traditions. Together, we can approach Advent as a time to prepare for Christmas, to be fulfilled by the anticipation, and to avoid the frenzy that can so easily overwhelm us in December. If you are subscribed to the Weekly Digest, you will automatically receive the calendar entries each day. Do encourage your friends to sign up for the calendar. It will, of course, continue to be free.
Some of you have noted with delight that our colleague and friend Cheryl Swope has made two recent contributions to our Weekly Digest, inaugurating a series she calls “Starting Small.” Cheryl has earned a special standing in the Classical Education movement with her acclaimed book Simply Classical: A Beautiful Education for Any Child (Memoria Press 2013). If you have never read this book try to do it. It is a stunning and movingly beautiful work. We are proud and pleased to feature her writing in these pages.
Finally, let me point out that our growing list of webinars (now totaling 56) and our Friday Performance Picks (now at 343 entries) have finally been indexed in a searchable format. Kuddos once again to Hank who has the gift of spending what sometimes seems like 27 hours a day at the computer doing this detailed type of work. We hope his work makes it easier for you to do your work and find whatever you might be looking for. Click through to the index of Webinars or Performance Picks.
