Itʻs Thanksgiving weekend as I write this and although the actual day has passed and in the history books, my table is still decorated in fall colors. In case you havenʻt figured it out already, Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year — perhaps this is because I generally donʻt have any musical responsibilities… Read More A day of feasting
This week we have been hosting the four players of New World Recorders (Gwyn Roberts, Hélöise Degrugillier, Emily O’Brien and Rainer Beckmann) and it is a real team effort to put all the pieces together. Our Early Music Hawaii president, Scott Fikse, was in Honolulu last weekend to coordinate all the details of the service,… Read More New World Recorders — a team effort
How many of us think about what kind of music we want at our funerals? My husband, Carl Crosier, talked about the music for his funeral for at least twenty years before we finally had to act on it. He had heard women at the Church of the Advent choir sing the Gregorian propers one… Read More Music for a funeral
It was back in August that I received a text message from Jeremy Wong, who thought about me as he wrote: Hi Kathy! Hope you’re well. I’m writing because I have been in touch with a documentarian in Germany named Tilo Krause who is producing and directing a huge 24 hour broadcast of Bach from… Read More Gravity Bach
I had planned to be away for this Diamond Jubilee birthday, so I booked a trip to Japan, to be able to take in the Bach Collegium Japan concert. As it turned out, however, I returned last Monday, several days before my actual birthday because I didn’t want to be gone longer than a week.… Read More Prehistoric!
That’s how I felt when I ordered sushi at Haneda Airport as I was departing Japan. Like many other people, one of my goals was to eat good food while in Japan, and sushi was on my list! In the slideshow below you can see the wide variety of meals we had in a short… Read More Mission accomplished!
My husband, Carl, always dreamed of hearing the Bach Collegium Japan, his favorite interpreters of the works of Bach … in Japan! We were fortunate to hear them live — in Los Angeles, Valparaiso, and even in Leipzig, Germany, at Bach’s church, St. Thomas. They were outstanding performances, all of them. But sadly, he never… Read More Hearing Bach Collegium Japan … in Japan!
We have just come from an incredible concert, a stunning blend of East and West, in a rich and complex work by Yui Kakinuma called Messe de Muromachi. We were invited to the concert by Kensuke Ohira, one of three organists at Hijirigaoka Church, who is the artistic director of Ensemble Muromachi. The composition fuses… Read More East meets West
In May of this year, when organbuilder Hans-Ulrich Erbslöh was in Hawaii to clean and add a couple of stops to the Beckerath organ, I mentioned that I was planning to go to Japan for my birthday this year. Hans immediately said that I ought to contact Takeshi Nakazato, with whom he had gone through… Read More A day with Takeshi
Last night we were at the Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre to hear Jean-Philippe Merckaert play a program of Buxtehude, Bach and Bert Matter on an organ which looked like this. He chose the repertoire carefully, in which the mean-tone tuning of the organ made it sound sweet and convincing: Dieterich Buxtehude, Toccata in D minov, BuxWV… Read More An engineering marvel!