On Valentine's Day, my sweetheart took me to see the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. He has a subscription to the BSO for the "Symphony with a Twist" series. We saw them around Halloween use children's toys and paper bags as instruments. Once they performed the soundtrack for the Charlie Chaplain movie, "City Lights."

The BSO's conductor, Maestra Marin Alsop, is the first woman to conduct a major American orchestra. She's wonderful, as you'll see in the above clips. Yesterday's performance included some music that she had been tracking down for years. Alsop was intrigued by the pianist and composer James P. Johnson who wrote "The Charleston" and was renown for his "stride" piano techniques that made him one of Harlem's most famous pianists She found some of his surviving relatives and one of them had some of his music stashed in the attic. Alsop brought the music to us all last night. Can you imagine? It was a powerful piece entitled "Drums."

Yesterday's twist was Savion Glover, a world renown tap dancer, who accompanied several of the pieces. I wouldn't even say what he was doing was tap dancing so much as podiatric, paroxysmal, percussion. It was wonderful!