On the first Tuesday every month at 12:30 p.m., you can travel back in time to an experience that would have been familiar to Jane Austen, Queen Victoria and other ladies throughout the 19th Century. Members of the Tuesday Musicale of Pasadena perform classical music in the Wright auditorium at the Pasadena Library in a free recital. They even offer a modest ‘tea’ afterwards.
If you close your eyes, you can imagine refined ladies in long pastel dresses sitting around a drawing room while their talented friends–singers, pianists, cellists–perform works by Mozart, Bach, Offenbach and others.
I am marking this up as a once-in-a-lifetime experience, mostly because I am not a particular fan of soprano solos.
This recital is one of several free concerts given monthly around Pasadena. I particularly like the concerts held on the third Saturday at 4 p.m. at the Methodist Church because it often features organ music which I like. The Presbyterian Church also offers free noontime concerts as well as evening ones.
Pasadena has from almost its beginning back in 1874 prided itself on being a cultural center. And, as I discovered in a corner of the main hall on my way to the recital, the Library has a longer history than I knew.
