Anyone in the field of the performing arts knows that first impressions are important. After all, as soon as performers walk onstage, even before the performance begins, audiences are bound to form some opinion on how likeable they are. Dancers

A number of historical documents preserve an amusing little anecdote about Franz Liszt’s visit to the Ottoman Empire in 1847. It basically reads as follows: “After a 54-hour long trip from Galatz, Liszt had at last reached Constantinople. Here, he

The music of Alexander Scriabin inhabits a distinctive, personal soundworld which is hard to define. It is the music of excess, ecstasy, tumult and passion. It is excessive, overripe, decadent, heavily perfumed, sensuous and frenzied, lacking in structure and sometimes

When the British explorer extraordinaire Richard Francis Burton published his translation of the traditional Middle Eastern stories in The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night in 1885, he brought the extraordinary wealth of Arabic storytelling to the West.