Music Media Monthly

Changing Lives: Gustavo Dudamel, El Sistema and the Transformative Power of Music by Tricia Tunstall

This is the first book in English to document a remarkable program in Venezuela that teaches large groups of children to play instruments, starting them as young as three years old. Since El Sistema, as the program is informally called, has produced the charismatic young conductor Gustavo Dudamel, global music lovers have taken notice. They hope it and similar programs now begun in other areas will give birth to future stars. Tricia Tunstall creates a vibrant snapshot of the original program in Venezuela and variations on it in the U.S. thus far.

El Sistema is the product of a visionary economist and musician named José Antonio Abreu. In the mid-1970s he decided to organize young people regardless of family economic level into performing workshops. He was acting in reaction to the solitary world of the conservatory, but he also saw social value in building community among young, economically disadvantaged players.

At first only 11 showed up for a rehearsal in a garage. From that grew the idea of more advanced musicians teaching younger pupils in a group setting that became a neighborhood unit or nucleo.

There are now an astonishing 400,000 students in government-supported nucleos throughout Venezuela. Dudamel, its most famous graduate, has been the sensation of the music world since being chosen, while still in his twenties, to be principal conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

The most revolutionary part of El Sistema is that it emphasizes groups playing together as a team, and thus as a way of fostering social change. Tunstall quotes Abreu saying “if you put a violin in the hands of a needy child, that child will not pick up a gun.”

Changing Lives is written with verve, in a journalistic style. It opens with a portrait of Dudamel and the LA Phil opening its fall 2009 season with a free concert – Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, no less – at the Hollywood Bowl. It includes playing by the YOLA (Youth Orchestra LA) as well. The crowd is filled with Latinos and others who love what the author calls the Venezuelan “with the emotive hair and an impressive career trajectory.”

Then the author visits some classes and nucleos in Venezuela itself. It turns out there is not one main youth orchestra but several. The top two are the ones that tour the world. Tunstall paints an exceedingly upbeat – some might say too upbeat — picture of the children, who love their instruments and their sound. Although Tunstall throws in a few brief caveats about how not everyone is equally talented, she says nothing about what must be the inevitable failures and dropouts.

However, she is clear that El Sistema is more than a music education scheme; it is a mission and a message. Her book is a valuable introduction to the phenomenon of Dudamel and the program that nurtured him and many others.

Changing Lives: Gustavo Dudamel, El Sistema and the Transformative Power of Music by Tricia Tunstall. 2012.  298 pages. ISBN 978-0-393-07896-1. W. W. Norton & Co.

Weep, Shudder, Die: A Guide to Loving Opera by Robert Levine

This priceless little book had me laughing out loud. It is primarily a guide to the standard repertoire, aimed squarely at the hordes of us who have become regular opera goers because our local movie theaters are now showing HD broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera in New York, which are both comfortable to watch in jeans and much easier on the wallet.

The introduction, “No Need to Wear Your Jewelry,” gives away Levine’s down-to-earth message. He is an expert who wants to take the starch out of enjoying the miracle of music combined with drama. As he says, the plots don’t really matter; the voices and the music do, because there are moments that “should and will transport us to a sphere way above our quotidian lives.”

For each opera Levine summarizes the plot, lists leading characters and includes a few paragraphs on unique elements (called “Achtung! Moments” in the German opera section and “Far Morire” – “to die for” – in the Italian and French). A bonus: funny captions on photos of olden-times performers in costumes. One, for instance, shows unnamed, outlandishly dressed Magic Flute participants with the caption:  “Papageno finally meets Papagena, an arrangement clearly made on WeirdDate.com.”

Weep, Shudder, Die by Robert Levine. 2011. 242 pages. ISBN 078-0-06-194131-3. It Books.

Fear of Music by Jonathan Lethem

For a decade, Continuum Books has published a series it calls 33 1/3, small volumes that allow a critic to obsess about a single album in his or her collection that deserves more than liner notes. The latest, from the novelist and essayist Jonathan Lethem, is a wonderful time-tripper that takes him (and us) back to 1979. We see through his middle-aged eyes “a fifteen year old boy sitting in his bedroom” listening to the radio, as lead singer David Byrne announces Talking Heads’ third album.

I loved this album too, and Lethem is so good at evoking its pleasures, from the textured cardboard of the cover to its best song, “Life During Wartime,” that I actually pulled out my copy of the original 33 1/3 rpm LP to re-examine it.

The book is packed with insights simple and complex on the band, this album, and subsequent ones, including an individual chapter on each cut.  Lethem locates the band’s stature as the best of its era but what’s audacious (and typical for this terrific writer) is that he picks not TH’s greatest album, but the one before Remain in Light, with which Talking Heads shed its New York downtown parochialism to become a national phenomenon, later captured on film in Jonathan Demme’s documentary Stop Making Sense. This book distills the rapturous moment for Lethem and, by proxy, for each of us, when “mere” pop tunes spark an epiphany that lasts a lifetime.

Fear of Music by Jonathan Lethem, 2012. 141 pages. ISBN 978-1-4411-2100-4. Continuum.  Paperback.

– Grace Lichtenstein

A Natural Woman: A Memoir by Carole King.

Carole King occupies a singular and extraordinary place in pop music history and her frank, engaging memoir shows us why. Now 70, King’s life has spanned the whole of rock and roll history, from Elvis onward. Here, she describes her journey — from Brooklyn childhood to pioneering working mother, hit songwriter, star performer and environmental activist. While King has chosen to omit a few key private matters that were revealed in Sheila Weller’s dishy Girls Like Us (Atria Books, 2008), she talks about her personal life in the same authentic voice that has endeared her to generations of fans. They are sure to make this No. 1 with a bullet on their must-read list.

Absorbing classical and show music thanks to her mother, King was a prodigy who began making up songs on the piano at three.  Then, inspired by the black rhythm and blues she heard on radio and at Alan Freed’s live shows at the Brooklyn Paramount theater, she developed her own ambition, with chutzpah to match. She wangled introductions to Freed, Don Costa and other industry luminaries while still attending James Madison High School.

But Carole also longed to be popular and attractive to boys. (Didn’t we all? Full disclosure: we were classmates and I later wrote about her for The New York Times.) Graduating from high school at 16, she found her soul mate at Queens College in Gerry Goffin, who became her lyricist. Quickly married, they competed with other songwriting duos in tiny cubicles at Al Nevins’ and Don Kirschner’s Aldon Music. (See review below.) By her 18^th birthday, King and Goffin were the proud parents of both a baby girl and “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” the first of a mind-boggling number of chart-topping tunes.

Her career took a new turn when King and Goffin separated in 1968. She left the hit-factory nest for California. She became a Laurel Canyon hippie earth mother and matured into a singer-songwriter of supreme craftsmanship and warmth. However, at the peak of her fame –1971’s Tapestry became “a multiplatinum-selling album that had wildly exceeded my teenage dreams” — King was ambivalent toward success. She didn’t want to be a star; she preferred being a mom and a sideman.  “I didn’t want the problems that came with being famous,” she writes.  Alas, she could not avoid them.

Married to bassist Charlie Larkey, King stayed home with her newborn third daughter rather than travel to collect Tapestry’s three Grammies.  A fourth child, a son, came along, and she grew even more torn between touring and the comfort of husband and family.

When she and Larkey divorced, she found herself “spending social time with people actively seeking the very visibility that I had tried to avoid….living a lifestyle I loathed….a parody of a pop star.”

Her reaction was radical: she turned her back on fame and ran off to the wilds of Idaho with Rick Evers, a drifter who became husband number three. She says she ought to “have asked Rick two questions: ‘Why are you living in a van?’ and ‘Are you by any chance psychotic?’” In the most painful part of the book, she admits that he physically abused her and that she betrayed her own sense of self by staying with him. He died of a cocaine overdose in 1978. Always feeling she needed the approval of a man, she next married an Idaho survivalist, “Teepee Rick” Sorensen. That didn’t last either.

Carole was not the kind of hippie who got lost in a drug haze – she was too busy milking goats and homeschooling her youngest two children while living miles from nowhere in Idaho. And she never abandoned music. The book is filled with tales about her forays out of the wilderness to write new songs, tour and get together with musicians such as John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson and especially James Taylor, whom she credits with pushing her into the solo spotlight.

Because she effectively stops at 2005, there is nothing of her sensational 2010 reunion tour with Taylor; hopefully King will write a sequel about it. Meanwhile, alongside recent releases like Keith Richards’ Life and Jay-Z’s Decoded, this is an essential addition to every collection of pop autobiography.

A Natural Woman: A Memoir by Carole King. 2012, 488 pages. ISBN 978-1-4555-1261-4. Grand Central Publishing.

Don Kirshner: The Man with the Golden Ear, by Rich Podolsky.

The story of the Brill Building era of pop music, and of legendary teams like King and Goffin, Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill and others has been told before, most notably by Ken Emerson in Always Music in the Air (Viking, 2005). As its most important ringmaster, Don Kirshner, who built its powerhouse publishing house Aldon and later the TV show Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, deserves a biography. Journalist Rich Podolsky provides it.

Anyone eager to hear Gerry Goffin’s first-hand version of events can read it in either book. Podolsky also conducted long interviews with Kirshner before he died in January 2011.  Podolsky’s trials in connecting with his subjects make for awkward passages; best are the details behind the astounding series of hits between 1958 and 1963, from Bobby Darin’s “Splish Splash” to “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feeling” by the Righteous Brothers.

The roster of artists whose tunes came from Aldon songs reads like a wing of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: King, Darin, Sedaka, Connie Francis, Tony Orlando, the Drifters, the Shirelles, the Everly Brothers, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme.

Kirschner spurred what Podolsky calls “a healthy competition” among the song-writing teams. The reward: as little as $25 apiece per song. Eventually Kirshner signed his brood to longer-term contracts, but they realized, as King writes, that they were “chattel.” Although Podolsky’s portrait is of a lovable father figure, he was, more importantly, a shrewd businessman taking advantage of naïve youngsters. No wonder they felt betrayed when Kirshner in 1963 sold Aldon to Screen Gems/Columbia for millions of dollars. Time heals all wounds; Don Kirshner is to be inducted (posthumously) into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this month and his presenter will be Carole King.

Don Kirshner: The Man with the Golden Ear, by Rich Podolsky. Hal Leonard Books 2012. ISBN: 978-1458416704. 304 pages.  Hardcover.

– Grace Lichtenstein

Best Music Writing 2011. Alex Ross, guest editor; Daphne Carr, series editor

Since 2000 this series has been a reliable source of well-written, sometimes quirky, sometimes brilliant essays originally written for a wide variety of magazines on “rock, hip-hop, jazz, pop, country and more,” as the earliest installments were subtitled. The latest in this annual anthology is something of a departure, with an even more inclusive goal, because the guest editor is Alex Ross, the esteemed classical music critic for the New Yorker. Most previous volumes had either a token single classical entry or none at all. Ross and series editor Daphne Carr have included among the 32 selections five on classical themes, ranging from the impact of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony on the musical world of 1805, by New York Magazine’s Justin Davidson, to a thoughtful review by Wendy Lesser of a contemporary string quartet performed, as per composer Georg Friedrich Haas’s instructions, in total darkness.

In his columns and books, Ross has proved to be an eclectic listener open to all genres. His introduction shows him at his erudite yet playful best, weaving Twitter, Justin Bieber and Schopenhauer into the first two pages, then proposing that in today’s world the musical mainstream his withered. “How do you map a micromusical landscape? Is there a universal language of criticism that can be spoken across the borders of genre?” he asks.

Best Music Writing 2011’s landscape is vast.  In the superstar galaxy, Vanessa Grigoriadis discerns the art behind Lady Gaga’s calculated rise; Chris Norris dissects the quest by will.i.am “to unite the largest possible audience over the broadest range imaginable;”  James Wood steps into a metaphorical phone booth, strips off his literary critic suit and reveals himself to be a rock and roll drummer, with an obsessive’s dazzling riff on what made Keith Moon great.

There are astute looks at jazz, hip-hop and the rest. Joe Hagan examines the diaries that singer Nina Simone left behind, revealing her losing battle with depression.  Jonathan Bogart’s deep dive into “TiK ToK” by white songwriter-rapper Ke$ha, Nitsuh Abebe’s exploration of blackness and CocoRosie, and Jessica Hopper’s  take on M.I.A. are just three of this collection’s provocative pieces about women who rock.  In the prose equivalent of a novelty record, there is a Washington Post article on a local wedding singer, which tells much about changing culture and social mores.

Among my personal favorites are two classical rants dressed to kill in social media: In a blog post, pianist Jeremy Denk positively bludgeons the blandness of most program notes.  And Marcia Adair’s #operaplot 2010 contest winners are so LOL that I feel impelled to quote one tweet in its entirety:

So I wrote this guy this EPIC love letter & he’s like “No thanks,” but now I’m married & rich & he’s all “OMG I LURV U!!” WTF? [Eugene Onegin, by Daniel John Kelley]

Ross writes that “we didn’t look for articles by and of insiders; we wanted writerly seductions.” Count me among the seduced.

Best Music Writing 2011, Alex Ross, Guest Editor, Daphne Carr, Series Editor. Da Capo Press, 2011. ISBN: 9780306819636. 311 pages. Paperback.

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire by Will Hermes

Inclusive is almost too weak an adjective to describe Will Hermes’ kaleidoscopic history, subtitled “Five Years in New York that Changed Music Forever.” The years under review are 1973 to 1977, during which new forms of music erupted and thrived in the city even as it sank, weighted down by crime, grime and dysfunctional subways, into near-bankruptcy. ”For a kid growing up then, it was pretty dispiriting,” writes Hermes, then a teenager living in Queens, an “outer borough” that is a subway ride from Manhattan.

But Hermes, a Rolling Stone critic and NPR contributor, wants to set the record straight for anyone who still believes the period — “post-Aquarian revolution, before punk and hip-hop begot the new age — was a cultural dead zone.” While other books (most notably Just Kids by Patti Smith) have covered some of the same territory, this is the first  book I’ve seen that presents a full-length chronological account, meticulously footnoted, with an invaluable discography and bibliography.

Promising a “telescopic, panoramic, superhero vision,” Hermes focuses not just on lower Manhattan, where the Velvet Underground and the New York Dolls paved the way for Television, Talking Heads, the Ramones, and punk rock, but on uptown and the Bronx, in African-American communities and el barrio, in lofts filled with new jazz and in outdoor parks where young men drew crowds simply by jacking their sound systems into municipal streetlight outlets.

Hermes explores the different strands of salsa, soul, disco, rap, new jazz, jazz fusion, rock and r&b as they played out across the city. He shows how young white artists downtown such as Tom Verlaine, John Cale, Laurie Anderson, Meredith Monk, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, La Monte Young and others cross-pollinated what was happening at now-legendary venues like the Mercer Arts Center, Max’s Kansas City and CBGB. He is terrific in placing others – Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, the Fania All Stars, Eddie Palmieri – at the forefront of change. He also pays homage to key DJs, critics and newspapers like the Village Voice and Soho Weekly News that were vital to spreading the news from the underground .

Like Alex Ross, Hermes has big ears. Just about the only music slighted are Broadway musicals (not that many readers will care; I didn’t) and home-grown mainstream pop and rock performers. Some artists, like Kiss and Paul Simon, rate a passing nod; others, like Billy Joel, do not. This is a quibble, however. Hermes vividly recreates a world in which New Jerseyans like Smith and Bruce Springsteen could live their dream in the great metropolis across the Hudson, where jazz labels took chances on avant-gardists like Anthony Braxton and David Murray and where every musician seemed to be doing something interesting the night of the 1977 blackout.

The book, whose title comes from a Talking Heads song, is a headlong rush backward to a consequential age, told in a colorful style that will keep you turning the pages even if you never heard Celia Cruz live. Will Hermes will make you wish you had.

Love Goes To Buildings On Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever By Will Hermes. Faber and Faber Inc., 2011, ISBN-13: 9780865479807, 368 pages. Hardcover.

– Grace Lichtenstein

Riccardo Muti: An Autobiography – First the Music, Then the Words, by Riccardo Muti; afterward by Marco Grondona

Conductors, given their highly visible roles in symphony and opera come in two basic and opposing flavors: the humanists/persuaders (Koussevitsky, Bernstein, Mitropoulos) and the autocrats/high priests/maestros (Szell, Toscanini, Reiner). Riccardo Muti belongs in the first category. Reading Muti’s autobiography, it seems likely that two factors contributed to forming his temperate approach to music making. First, there is his southern Italian birth in the affable town of Molfetta, near Naples and below the Gargano Peninsula on the Adriatic. Second, as primarily an opera conductor, Muti has had to acquire (or, if the proclivity is natural, to tap into) those people skills that are necessary for effective collaboration with volatile opera singers. The result is a conductor of wide interests – a leader with a philosophical, positive outlook capable of inspiring his musicians to attain transformational levels of performance.

Muti has held important guest posts in Europe and in America. The Maggio Musicale in Florence, Italy’s oldest music festival, focusing on opera; the London’s Philharmonia Orchestra; the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics; the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra; the New York Philharmonic, and the Salzburg Festival. Currently, Muti is the Music Director of the Chicago Symphony.

At age 70, Muti has had little in the way of high drama or conflict in his life, and his career path over 40 years shows a steady, upward trajectory to the highest conductorial perches. So is the book, then, simply a placid memoir, reflecting on the glories of an untroubled life and career? No. There’s much here to attract and hold the reader’s attention: reflections that impart the spirit of the man, with his ethical values, love for people and, surprisingly, his typically Italian brand of humor. While reading Muti’s book, I thought of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, which reflect a stoic, self-effacing way of life. Here’s a prime example: according to Muti, “a maestro shouldn’t seek out the limelight, especially in the later part of his life. Once he’s had his career, he should withdraw from the media and try, as much as possible, to bring music to others so that he, ephemeral himself, doesn’t fall victim to the ephemeral nature of conducting.” Demonstrating his point, Muti has led concerts for prison inmates and at juvenile detention centers, conducted at Ground Zero for the families of 9/11 victims, and in Sarajevo at the conclusion of the Bosnian war.

A notable aspect of the book is its large selection of photos. Highlights include informal double portraits with England’s Queen Elizabeth II and with Pope John Paul II; Muti as child prodigy violinist; and Muti’s in triumphant performances at La Scala and in Vienna, Japan, Philadelphia and Chicago.

The afterword by Marco Grondona, a 43-page analysis of Muti’s conducting style, compares it to those of Schubert, Bellini and Verdi, among others, and makes for a rather extended postscript. Muti acolytes will love it, no doubt, as it pays tribute to the maestro, saying great things about Muti that the conductor, out of self-effacing humility, has not written. But because of this abrupt change in tone it makes for a strange and awkward stylistic volte-face.

Riccardo Muti: An Autobiography – First the Music, Then the Words is recommended primarily for opera lovers, and will make a worthy addition to libraries with collections on conductors and opera.

Riccardo Muti: An Autobiography – First the Music, Then the Words, by Riccardo Muti; afterward by Marco Grondona. Rizzoli, 2011. ISBN 978-0-8478-3724-3. 244 pages. Hardcover.

Blue Notes in Black and White – Photography in Jazz, by Benjamin Cawthra

Jazz music and black-and-white art photography are quintessentially 20^th century art forms; both matured at the same time. By the early 1940s, the development of camera technology made hand-held field cameras like the press favorite Speed Graphic 4×5, along with relatively fast film, available for the first time to innovative photographers who loved jazz and were inspired to document the modern jazz scenes–mostly in midtown Manhattan’s jazz bistros, which featured legendary black musicians. The lasting legacy of these visual artists is a treasury of iconic musical imagery. The works of master photographers such as Herman Leonard, Gjon Mili, Allan Grant, William P. Gottlieb, William Claxton, Art Kane and others evokes glorious music from the 1930s through the 1960s that in many ways defines American culture in our mind’s eye and ear.

Benjamin Cawthra’s outstanding book Blue Notes in Black and White – Photography in Jazz provides a window into the history of jazz and a perfect merging of jazz music and black-and-white art photography. It also illustrates both the gradual merging and eventual divergence of black and white cultures during the middle of the 20th century. As the author writes, “Over the thirty years from 1936-1965, the photography of jazz created a visual rhetoric that argued for racial inclusiveness in the 1930s, racial equality in the 1940s and 1950s, and black cultural nationalism in the 1960s… In making jazz visible, photographers visually equated blackness with jazz at important moments in the music’s stylistic development.”

Jazz lovers will appreciate and learn the backstory of the music as well, for Cawthra’s Blue Notes in Black and White is as much about the musicians themselves–Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins and many other seminal artists–as it is about the iconic photographs of them.

My only complaint is that the book should have contained a high quality portfolio section in the form of plates to represent the legendary photographs in their full glory. Instead, we get relatively few of the photographs and most only in half-page sizes and low resolution. Blue Notes in Black and White should really have been a coffee table book, to do justice to the photographic art. It’s for this reason that I cannot recommend it to photographers and students of black-and-white photography, which is a shame. I do highly recommend the book to libraries with extensive jazz collections and to lovers of jazz.

Blue Notes in Black and White – Photography in Jazz, by Benjamin Cawthra. University of Chicago Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-226-03875-3. 343 pages. Hardcover.

– Steve Dankner

George Szell – A Life of Music, by Michael Charry.

Biographies of major 20^th century conductors appear to be proliferating these days. Within the past year I’ve reviewed three books on Leonard Bernstein, and one each on Arturo Toscanini and Dimitri Mitropoulos. This month, George Szell is in the dock, to be followed next month with a review of an autobiography by Riccardo Muti. It goes without saying that all these men were (are, in Muti’s case) venerable maestros who upheld the highest traditions of symphonic performance and brought the canonical classical masterworks to millions, as much by the sheer force of their podium personas and star power as by their uniquely legendary interpretations.

Former assistants or disciples wrote all but one of these books about “their” maestro, and so there is often an aura of veneration that the reader has to peel away to reveal an objective assessment of the conductor as man and artist. Not an easy thing to do in the case of these biographies, which becomes even more problematic for the reader, who, unlike the acolyte, was not the “fly on the wall,” able to see the real man concealed within the public legend.

In the case of George Szell (1897-1970), his accomplishment in molding the Cleveland Orchestra into perhaps America’s greatest orchestra, and certainly one of the world’s supreme ensembles will undoubtedly remain his utmost triumph, followed by his conquests as conductor at the Metropolitan Opera, his engagements with the New York Philharmonic, the NBC and Chicago Symphonies, the Berlin Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic and the Concertgebouw Orchestra. Szell’s many recordings document his genius and will ensure that his great musical legacy survives.

That being said, those who have followed Szell’s illustrious career know that, due to his unfortunate personal qualities of willfulness, arrogance and vindictiveness, he created much ill will and disdain towards him personally: abusing his players, peremptorily firing them, stealing first chair players from other orchestras, and, in a notorious incident at the Metropolitan Opera, walking out on a performance of Tannhaüser in a fit of pique, angered by a mechanical breakdown in the change of scenery. Some years later, Szell, in an uncharacteristically introspective moment, averred, “I’m my own worst enemy.” Rudolf Bing, then the Met’s General Manager, who endured Szell’s insubordination, had the last word: “Not while I’m alive.”

Similar Szell anecdotes are legion among musicians. You won’t find more than a handful, though, in Michael Charry’s book. In assessing the podium tyrants Szell and Toscanini, one concludes that there is but one possible defense of their behavior: that their music making was of such a high order that it justified their dictatorial excesses (in other words, you had to take the [very] bad with the [very] good).

For the rest, which is a mostly dry chronicle of Szell’s triumphs and brilliance throughout his long career, Charry does an adequate job. What is missing is in-depth insight into the mind and persona of a great, but conflicted and possibly troubled mind. We never get to know who George Szell is – the person. The tone instead is respectful and objective. Perhaps a fearsome personality could only engender respect. Still, Szell, the anti-Mitropoulos, love him or hate him, did change the musical world, especially in the United States, by setting the highest possible standards of orchestral performance. For this, if little else, we should be grateful.

George Szell – A Life of Music, by Michael Charry. University of Illinois Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-252-03616-3. 412 pages. Hardcover.

Carnegie Hall Treasures, by Tim Page and Carnegie Hall.

This is a fun, fact-filled, coffee-table-sized tome for lovers of classical music lore and memorabilia. It’s a sort of “Antiques Roadshow” featuring facsimiles of autographed photographs of virtuoso musicians, concert programs, reminiscences, poster art, architectural sketches and much else to pore over. Readers interested in how this, the most illustrious concert hall in America (and perhaps the world), came to be built will learn the story of the coming to maturity of America’s corporate arts culture in fin de siècle New York. The chronicle begins with two chapters that define the importance of Carnegie Hall as a cultural icon: “A Concert Hall for the Ages” and “The People’s House,” its innovative construction (by an architect who had never built a concert hall,) and the landmark inaugural concerts conducted by Tchaikovsky in 1891.

The next chapter, “Celebrating the Composers,” documents the premiere of Camille Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila in 1892 and Antonín Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony the following year, along with premieres of major works of John Philip Sousa, Jean Sibelius, Richard Strauss, and others, through the 20^th century to works of Pierre Boulez, Elliott Carter, and many others. This chapter, even more than the others, is filled with photographs, autographed musical manuscripts and other documentation, alongside fascinating musical commentary. As a composer, this was my favorite part. It’s through this particular panorama—as living history—that the book really comes alive.

There’s much more: chapters on the exceptional orchestras and maestros who have performed at Carnegie, and an album of great singers. Chapters on “All That Jazz,” “Pop and World Music,” “Rock and Folk Royalty” and “A Space for More Than Concerts” brings to conclusion this grand circumnavigation of Carnegie Hall’s unique and remarkable history.

“If you believe in ghosts, this would be the place to find them,” writes author/music critic Tim Page. Carnegie Hall Treasures is a wonderful book to leaf through, either in sequence or in random order, and I most highly recommended it to anyone and everyone. It’s a book worthy of its subject: a ‘treasure’ indeed. Carnegie Hall, which was saved by a group of concerned New Yorkers led by the great violinist and humanitarian Isaac Stern in 1960, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1964 and a New York City Landmark in 1967.

Carnegie Hall Treasures, by Tim Page and Carnegie Hall, 2011. HarperCollins ISBN 978-0-06-170367-6. 221 pages. Hardcover.

– Steve Dankner

The Life of Schumann, by Michael Musgrave

Concert presenters and performers looking for a “hook” can perhaps be forgiven for latching on to famous composers’ birth (and death) anniversaries in programming canonical works. The celebratory appearance of a beloved past master’s music in mass quantities is a sure way to increase concert attendance, especially by listeners with conservative tastes. It’s not the same with books. Here, I admit I’m less cynical of the motives of authors of composer biographies. A re-awakened interest in the 200^th birth year anniversary of Beethoven in 1970, followed similarly by the Schumann and Chopin bicentennials last year, were the occasions for new and important research, resulting in valuable contributions to our understanding about their lives and music. The Life of Schumann, by Michael Musgrave, is a case in point.

Schumann is a composer about whom much is generally known, but not in any great depth. The general trajectory of his tragic and eventful life is familiar: his beginnings as an passionate artist equally in love with both literature and music; his failed attempt to become a virtuoso pianist; his meeting and falling in love with Clara, the daughter of his piano teacher, and his turn to composition thereafter; his founding of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik; the development and expansion of his compositional goals from solo piano to vocal to music for strings and the creation of symphonies, concerti, choral works and an opera; his close friendship with Mendelssohn and his professional dealings with  most of the musical giants in the milieu that centered around him, due to his growing influence as editor and music critic for the Neue Zeitschrift; his fostering and championing of the young Brahms, and, sadly, his gradual descent into madness, an attempted suicide and his terrifying confinement in an insane asylum for the last two years of his life.

Finally, there’s the conundrum of the visibility of Schumann’s music: the solo piano works have always been in print and are regularly performed, as has been the ever-popular Piano Concerto in A Minor, Op. 54. Not so secure, however, have been the four symphonies – which were criticized for their heavily scored textures despite the inspired and beautiful music they contain. And there are the many choral and sacred works (including a Mass, Op. 147 and a Requiem, Op. 148), the opera Genoveva, and many other works in various genres that are rarely heard, even today. For a major and influential composer, Schumann is perhaps on a par with Berlioz in suffering semi-obscurity, for many of his late and highly original works remain unknown to the concertgoing public.

Author Michael Musgrave does an admirable job of filling in the detail of Schumann’s life, and much of it is revelatory and shocking. In an introductory chapter, he focuses on the youthful Schumann’s impending insanity, and its cause—syphilis, revealed only in 1971, with the publication of the composer’s notebooks, correspondence and diaries. The author writes: “… though Schumann did not manifest the clear symptoms of tertiary syphilis until the 1850s, his many ‘routine’ illnesses over the years were manifestations of the ‘latent’ secondary stage.” Symptoms of the disease had first appeared as early as 1831, and Schumann underwent periodic treatments from then on, hoping for a cure, which he thought he had obtained by 1840. Musgrave continues: “This explains why he subsequently married and had a large family: that Clara did not apparently contract the disease is not a challenge to this view: she could have been a carrier, but not infectious.”

Is it, then, an out-of-bounds stretch to infer that this may be why Brahms—by 1853 a member of the Schumann household—thought better of marrying Clara after Schumann’s death in 1856? Musgrave does not bring this up, but the idea insinuates itself: Brahms was above all a cautious and conservative man, and certainly would have known the root cause of Schumann’s horrible, terminal illness. Brahms researchers—what do you think?

Musgrave examines Schumann’s phobias and obsessions as a window through which to view his music, but does not conclude that these mental aberrations caused a decline in the composer’s creative powers:

There is no doubt that the traditional assumption of Schumann’s illness —whether one of incipient madness attached to creativity, or a progressive mental illness leading to attempted suicide—has influenced the evaluation of his music, especially his later music: and viewed the other way, that the often inward, even brooding character of some later music is evidence of a declining mind… if there is a certain fatigue, this is the result of physical strain and over-production, not of reduced mental capacity.

The Life of Schumann conveys with great sensitivity and insight the inner world of Robert, and also his relationship with his beloved Clara, as it charts the scope of his triumphs in Leipzig and Dresden, his ensuing disillusionment in Düsseldorf, and the despair to follow at the end of his life. Clara’s diary excerpts of Robert’s schizophrenia are heartbreaking to read; shortly after they were written he threw himself into the Rhine.

Today, 156 years after his passing, Schumann speaks to us with a voice we intuitively recognize—one of innocence merged with complexity, and triumph mingled with unnamable sorrow.

The Life of Schumann is part of Amadeus Press’ ‘Musical lives’ series. Most highly recommended for lovers of Schumann’s music, and for those interested in early-to-mid German Romantic music and the beginnings of 19^th century music/literary commentary, it deserves a place in library collections with comprehensive composer biographies, music histories and music criticism.

The Life of Schumann, by Michael Musgrave. Cambridge University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-521-80248-2. 224 pages. Hardback.

– Steve Dankner

Bernstein’s Orchestral Music—an Owner’s Manual, by David Hurwitz

With the death of Leonard Bernstein in 1990, there came a flood of recordings of his compositions; of music recorded by him with the New York Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic and other orchestras; and, over time, a galaxy of books by authors scholarly, popular, and in-between. For all his well-documented doubts regarding his own musical legacy and the staying power of his “classical” music, it’s now abundantly clear that Bernstein—composer of “serious” and musical theatre scores, orchestral maestro, mentor (in the various roles of teacher, quasi-biblical sage and professor,) pianist, media icon and political/social conscience of the “radical chic” 1960s generation—has entered the pantheon of America’s greatest musicians, in the company of such greats as Gershwin, Ellington and Copland.

One can read a little or a lot about Bernstein, reflect upon the polished patina of his conductor/celebrity status, or get to know him more profoundly by tracing the personal journeys he took while coming to grips with the musical/philosophical/religious issues (and demons) that occupied and sometimes plagued his mind.

Where to begin? A good place is David Hurwitz’s Bernstein’s Orchestral Music—an Owner’s Manual. The 24-page introduction offers an excellent, concise primer on Bernstein, revealing the essence of who he was and the intractable and often conflicting forces that made him such a complex man. The dominant themes of Bernstein’s creative challenges and dilemmas emerge: “A Great Composer?”; “The Atonal Interruption”; in a nod to Schoenberg’s famous essay on Brahms, “Bernstein the Progressive”; “The Curse of Popularity”; The Jewish Legacy” and its corollary “The Crisis of Faith”; “Theatricality: ‘Joy’”—all are covered with delightful honesty and great insight. One can learn, in essence, all that is essential about Bernstein without ever having to crack a more “serious” tome.

After this excellent précis, the author describes Bernstein’s orchestral oeuvre in four substantive chapters titled “The Three Symphonies and Concertos”; “Overtures and Shorter Pieces”; “Vocal and Choral Music”; and “Ballets and Suites.” Overall, 20 concert pieces are described, with some reader-friendly musical analysis (there are, thankfully, no graphic charts or hieroglyphic figured bass excerpts to decipher). It’s all elegantly and concisely written.

Bernstein’s Orchestral Music is an excellent all-around introduction to Leonard Bernstein’s classical scores. Devotees of Bernstein’s Broadway shows and musical theatre works, with the exception of the Candide Overture and the Symphonic Dances from ‘West Side Story’ will have to explore other sources. To guide the listener through the works discussed, a 17-track, 77-minute compact disc of Bernstein’s excerpted orchestral music is enclosed–a nice addition to the package.

Bernstein’s Orchestral Music—an Owner’s Manual is part of Amadeus Press’ Unlocking the Masters series. Highly recommended for Bernstein aficionados in particular, it deserves a place in library collections with subject specialty areas on conductors, contemporary music/composers and orchestral music.

Bernstein’s Orchestral Music—an Owner’s Manual, by David Hurwitz. Amadeus Press, 2011. ISBN 978-1-57467-193-3. 131 pages with compact disc. Softcover.

Devil Sent the Rain—Music and Writing in Desperate America, by Tom Piazza

Tom Piazza, one of today’s most perceptive cultural commentators, possesses a keen ear and eye for the dreams of the substrata of current American life. A resident of New Orleans since 1994, Piazza is a devotee of the city’s music scene and of rural Southern culture in all its diversity: jazz, Delta blues, country, bluegrass, folk, rockabilly and more. Piazza knows it all intimately, and he clearly loves all of it.

Devil Sent the Rain—Music and Writing in Desperate America is a compilation of essays and articles Piazza has written since 1994. In addition to interviews with great musicians such as Clarksdale, Mississippi’s Reverend Willie Morganfield, Nashville’s Jimmy Martin and rockabilly great Carl Perkins (composer of the song “Blue Suede Shoes”) there are wonderfully evocative riffs on bluesman Charlie Patton, four essays on Bob Dylan, and a piece each on pianist Jelly Roll Morton and “jump blues maestro” Joe Liggins.

In his essays, Piazza has a knack for getting to the essence of his subjects and making you feel as though you know these artists, even if you’ve never heard them sing or play a note. You’ll feel as if you’re in the room with Piazza as he interviews, for instance, Jimmy Martin–the self-proclaimed “King of Bluegrass.” This 1997 essay is a wild ride. (Piazza’s gift for capturing dialog flavored with regional accents has served him well in his recent writing for HBO’s hit drama series Treme.) In his Martin interview, which reads like a road movie, you’ll feel like you’re in the back seat of Martin’s lux black limo with cameras rolling as Piazza drives Martin, who’s a bit high after downing several 7 & 7’s, to the Grand Ole Opry for a performance.

To add to the mix, Piazza’s book offers perceptive commentary on post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans; his friendship with Norman Mailer; the BP oil spill; the current state of fiction and the contemporary novel; printed books vs. e-readers and blogs; Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and–in my favorite essay—discovering rare 78 rpm records in a cardboard box at a rural Cajun flea market.

It’s great stuff, all of it—brilliant, engaging and authentic. Most highly recommended.

Devil Sent the Rain—Music and Writing in Desperate America, by Tom Piazza. Harper Perennial, 2011. ISBN 978-0-06-200822-0. 282 pages. Softcover.

– Steve Dankner

Arturo Toscanini—the NBC Years, by Mortimer H. Frank

Conductors—Maestros, as the conservative and elite musical world still anachronistically prefers to call them—are always in the spotlight, and during their often years-long tenure with their orchestra(s) are either able to remain welcome or sadly become unwelcome.  James Levine’s struggles with persistent illnesses made him a liability to the Metropolitan Opera and Boston Symphony, despite his great musical gifts. By contrast, the Los Angeles Philharmonic had great good fortune in nabbing the talented young superstar Gustavo Dudamel in 2008. Conductors, with their built-in star power, have a way (along with opera divas) of galvanizing the concertgoing public’s attention.

For some long-range perspective, my attention was drawn to books about two legendary conductors of the past – Arturo Toscanini and Dimitri Mitropoulos. They were Maestros (an eminent master or teacher) when the designation really meant something. Precisely because they were of successive past eras, I found reading about them and their vastly different musical legacies to be instructive, learning why they followed divergent paths of sustaining revered tradition or moving forward towards adventurous progressivism; these paths are still being followed today. Conductors come and go, but both Toscanini and Mitropoulos, it seems safe to say, will remain archetypes for the calling of conductor/music director as long as orchestral music is cared about, and greatness in conductorial leadership is required.

In comparing Toscanini with Mitropoulos, I was reminded that in ancient Egypt, the God-pharaoh was often represented holding the shepherd’s crook in his right hand, representing the ruler’s loving concern for his people, and the flail in his left, symbolizing stern punishment. These two “pharaohs” of music, Toscanini, with his stern visage and fearsome outbursts, wielded his conductor’s flail; Mitropoulos, a kindly, modest and generous soul, was the shepherd; his concern for his orchestra members and to musicians in need, to whom he gave away almost all of his earned income, was as important as the music he invited them to lovingly perform.

Arturo Toscanini—the NBC Years, by Mortimer H. Frank, focuses on the years 1937-1954. In 1937 Toscanini had just left his principal conductor post at the New York Philharmonic, where, from 1929-1936, he attracted an immense following. In his early years, Toscanini was known primarily as an opera conductor, with close personal ties to the elder Verdi and the young Puccini. Frank writes: “David Sarnoff, President of RCA, grasped the suitability of symphonic music to what was still called in 1936 ‘the miracle of broadcasting’… and embarked upon…organizing a new world-class symphony orchestra… created expressly for Toscanini.” Beginning with his New York Philharmonic tenure, and with the unprecedented NBC offer, Toscanini’s focus shifted to the symphonic repertory, and, as a result brought the mostly 19^th century canon of classical orchestral masterworks to the masses via the newly ubiquitous medium of radio.

Arturo Toscanini—the NBC Years is a book for the record (CD) collector, audiophile buff, music historian and Toscanini enthusiast and has a place in libraries with holdings on conductors and repertoire. The author documents all of Toscanini’s and guest conductors’ NBC broadcasts in sequence, listing repertoire performed (including critical and historical/biographical commentary on the music and composers represented), NBC orchestra personnel, and the programs and itineraries of all the NBC Orchestra tours and performances. For the audiophile, Frank documents the sources of the NBC “transcriptions” of all the broadcasts (all were recorded,) and itemizes the RCA Toscanini Collection of 82 compact discs, which cover a large selection of the conductor’s performances from 1920-1952, as well. The book also lists ten Toscanini videos from 1948-1952 that also would be of great interest to this book’s targeted readership. Recommended.

Arturo Toscanini—the NBC Years, by Mortimer H. Frank, Amadeus Press, 2002. ISBN 1-57467-069-7. 358 pages. Hardcover.

Priest of Music—the Life of Dimitri Mitropoulos, by William R. Trotter

Dimitri Mitropoulos viewed the performance of music as a sacred, spiritual act, and himself a “priest of music.” In his worldview, he sought to put himself in the subordinate role of communicant, bearing witness to the great truths of the music he conducted. In his youth he was torn between a career in music or becoming a monk. In this regard, author William Trotter writes of Mitropoulos’ spartan accommodations and demeanor, when the conductor was music director of the Minnesota Orchestra: “… The furnishings were spare: bookcases, a few chairs,  a studio bed, an upright piano… the bare essentials of kitchen ware – distinctly monklike. The black turtleneck sweaters… the tonsured appearance of his formidable head… the large crucifix he always wore next to his heart… all contributed to the popular notion that Dimitri Mitropoulos actually was a monk, or at least a practicing mystic.”

Then there was Mitropoulos’ fabulous memory. He memorized scores completely, never using a score in rehearsal or even in a recording session! Composer John Verrall bore witness to the conductor’s photographic memory: “He knew (my score) so exactly, he could turn to me and say things like ‘on page 27, how loudly do you want to play those three measures”?

Beloved by his Minnesota Orchestra players, he was abused by some of the hardboiled New York Philharmonic musicians who would talk back to him and throw music at him in open rehearsal. Mitropoulos shrugged it off, not wanting to show anger or play the aggrieved martinet. When confronted by bad reviews or by players’ bullying, he always turned the other cheek.

Priest of Music—the Life of Dimitri Mitropoulos is a truly lovingly written biography of this gentle genius. He was, really, the St. Francis or Albert Schweitzer of music, and not least of all, one of the great musical minds of the 20^th century. Most highly recommended for music lovers of all persuasions, and for libraries with collections in musical biography, conducting and 20^th century music.

Priest of Music—the Life of Dimitri Mitropoulos, by William R. Trotter, Amadeus Press, 1995. ISBN 0-931340-81-0. 495 pages. Hardcover.

– Steve Dankner

Two wonderful and illuminating, though disturbing, books on the subject of the Holocaust and its impact during and after World War II are the focus of my reviews this month. Taken together, they expose the incalculable evils of Nazism and the resultant dislocation and torment of those European musicians who were prescient and fortunate enough to escape Hitler. So we have, with Eugene Drucker’s masterful novel The Savior, an insider’s view of hell, while in Dorothy Lamb Crawford’s A Windfall of Musicians we learn why the elite European classical musical culture was transplanted to America, en masse.

The Savior, by Eugene Drucker

Violinist Eugene Drucker, as most classical aficionados know, is a member of the world-renowned Emerson String Quartet. His novel The Savior is a powerful meditation on music in the face of barbarism, cruelty and despair. Musicians often speak of the ‘spirituality’ of great music. Here we have, in effect, music itself put on trial. Can Bach’s music offer at least palliative hope to those who have lost it, when performed for inmates in a forced labor camp? Is it an act of sadism even to try to offer such hope, knowing that it is illusory?

These are powerful themes, and in creating a tale in which, on its face, good is weaker than evil and is willfully perverted to inflict not hope, but the death of hope, Drucker has written a great book that rightly questions the morality of art and its place in a world in which life has descended to bare, pitiful existence and people’s lives are a daily nightmare, full of mental and physical torment beyond imagining.

The narrative is simple, though artfully told: Near the end of the Second World War, Gottfried Keller, a young German violinist deemed unfit for military service, is assigned to perform for wounded soldiers; soon he is transported to a death camp where the Kommandant orders him to play solo violin works for the starving, disease-ridden inmates, “to give them hope.” Bach’s “Chaconne,” from the Partita No. 2 in D Minor, BWV 1004 is the prescribed catalyst to provide spiritual salvation to these near-dead souls. The Kommandant’s motives seem inscrutable, and they are. The freakish dénouement is nothing less than horrifying. To flesh out the protagonist’s history, we are swept along with Keller’s own turbulent backstory–his relationships with a Jewish musician colleague and a Jewish lover–and his fear that these associations, if discovered, will brand him as a “Jew-lover” and will cause him to be executed.

The depiction of the inhumanity of that monstrous time and place will stay with me forever. The author has done a noble thing by recounting aspects of his father’s–violinist Ernst Drucker’s–life experience, which is an important source of the novel; Eugene Drucker takes the source beyond biography to make a universal statement.

The Savior deserves an honored place next to The Diary of Anne Frank, Elie Wiesel’s Night and Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz. To offer “congratulations” in a book review to Eugene Drucker is too puny a gesture; he has created a novel that will live.

The Savior, by Eugene Drucker, Simon and Schuster, 2007. ISBN 978-1-4165-4329-9. 204 pages. Paperback.

A Windfall of Musicians: Hitler’s Emigrés and Exiles in Southern California, by Dorothy Lamb Crawford

The self-expression and libertine attitudes of 1920s Weimar Republic-era Germany enjoyed by artists, composers, theatrical producers and others were swept away in 1933, with the assumption by Hitler of the German Chancellorship. The Third Reich soon instituted a period of artistic repression, leading inevitably, as Dorothy Crawford writes,

to the purging and eventual extermination of Jews, socialists, homosexuals and modernists (not only in Germany), as Hitler invaded or assumed control of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, France and Hungary… Artists found their work banned or eliminated, their civil liberties denied, and their means of survival extinguished. An enormous exodus of highly trained musicians from Europe (to America) ensued.

A Windfall of Musicians: Hitler’s Emigrés and Exiles in Southern California tells the fascinating story of how and why these artists–particularly composers–sought refuge in the United States, and in Southern California in particular. The Hollywood sound film was the lure. The unwanted composers of mitteleuropa–political and artistic refugees–descended upon Hollywood in droves in hopes of earning a living composing for the “talkies.”

Hitler’s “gift” to America includes both innumerable famous and unknown composers and performers–and not all German nationals. This book focuses on the well known: such composers as Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Hanns Eisler, Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, and Kurt Weill; conductors Otto Klemperer and Bruno Walter; and performers such as pianist Artur Rubinstein, violinist Joseph Szigeti, and soprano Lotte Lehmann.

Most did not know what to expect, much less how to break into film, and were greatly disillusioned. Klemperer exclaimed, “My God, my God, I didn’t know that such a lack of intellectuality existed.” As author Campbell points out, these artists migrated to the wrong place; New York City or Boston would have possessed the recognizable culture they knew: mature orchestras, opera houses, chamber music societies et al. The fledgling arts organizations in Southern California had no full time opera, a part time Los Angeles Philharmonic with no permanent concert hall, little in the way of chamber music until after 1940, and so on.

Émigré composers Max Steiner (who arrived in America in 1914,) Erich Korngold and Franz Waxman found unqualified success; most of the others were only able to find hack work as unaccredited subs for credited composers.

A Windfall of Musicians… tells an important, and heretofore largely undocumented story of the arts in the mass-market culture of the early-to-mid-20^th century under the influence of both National Socialism and star-struck Hollywood. As such, it is a perfect counterweight to Eugene Drucker’s personal account of the tormented violinist antihero in The Savior. Director/playwright Gottfied Reinhardt, himself an émigré, sums up the story of the exodus of artists from Europe perfectly: “It was a mass migration of a thrown-together elite unprecedented in history.” Most highly recommended.

A Windfall of Musicians: Hitler’s émigrés and Exiles in Southern California, by Dorothy Lamb Crawford, Yale University Press; 2009. ISBN 978-0-300-171238-5. 318 pages. Softcover.

– Steve Dankner

Death and the Maiden, by Gerald Elias

Whether or not Gerald Elias has invented the genre of musical detective/murder mystery novel, he has certainly put his stamp upon it, with three books in rapid succession. All center around the protagonist Daniel Jacobus – a blind, crusty old-school violinist, jaded pedagogue and amateur sleuth who has a knack for becoming involved with the shady, subterranean and ego-driven personalities who populate the dark side of classical music. Here, we have a studly missing violinist; a quasi-demonic “true believer” in the mystic powers of classical music; an unscrupulous dealer in rare violins; and the main characters: three of the four members of the New Magini String Quartet – a formerly stellar ensemble on the verge of collapse, due to its unaccounted-for and presumed dead first violinist, lost in Peru, of all places. The New Magini has thus become a quartet that is rife with bitterness and hatred; so much so that one member has devised a murderous plot to eliminate the other three. Who is it and why? Read the book.

For comic relief, Elias diverts us with the pidgin English of a Peruvian police chief and the slobbering affections – new to this installment – of Trotsky, the bulldog. And Jacobus himself, compared to his two previous incarnations, is more than usually prone to Henny Youngman-style one-liners and spoonerisms. What fun!

In plotting Death and the Maiden, Elias taps into the real-life account of the demise of the Audubon String Quartet – “the saddest case of inflamed passion” among many examples of the negative, bitter and divisive interpersonal relationships that are an occupational hazard for string quartets: four people rehearsing, arguing and touring for up to six hours each day, month after month, year after year; it happens. The inside story of the Audubon’s self-destruction, personal lawsuits and monetary losses is embellished by Elias to go way beyond the legal troubles and animosity experienced by the Audubon, and here extends to grisly dismemberment and murder. All this makes for highly unlikely material within the supposedly staid and highbrow world of classical music. If you’re a classical maven used only to the Olympian heights of idealized classical music, you’ll have to suspend disbelief to imagine that groups such as the New Magini can sink to this level of depravity. Call it a cloak and dagger musical melodrama, with Carnegie Hall as the backdrop.

The author, in an acknowledgement, writes, “One great thing about writing within your own field of expertise is that you don’t have to do a lot of research.” True enough: Elias, a concert violinist, writes with the ultimate practitioner’s/insider’s proficiency; many passages exhibit deep musical knowledge: his descriptions of how players in a string quartet shape phrases, articulate passages, etc. add immeasurably to the story, and enable the reader to feel like the proverbial “fly on the wall” at an intense rehearsal of a great piece of music.

Death and the Maiden is a great read and a worthy successor to Elias’ two previous Jacobus whodunits, Devil’s Trill and Dance Macabre. I’m already looking forward to his next book in the series. Most highly recommended.

Death and the Maiden, by Gerald Elias, Minotaur Books – an imprint of St. Martin’s Press; August, 2011. ISBN 978-0-312-67834-0. 291 pages. Hardcover.

My Nine Lives; a memoir of Many Careers in Music, by Leon Fleisher and Anne Midgette

The “nine lives” that renowned pianist, Peabody Conservatory instructor, conductor, and Tanglewood administrator Leon Fleisher recounts in his memoir-cum-autobiography follow an unpredictable, zigzag trajectory. Fleisher, a child prodigy, began studying piano at age four, gave his first recital at seven, and became a private student of the great Austrian pianist/composer Artur Schnabel at nine, beginning a remarkable ten-year mentorship. Fleisher was on track to fulfill a history-making destiny.

The pianist later became a protégé of conductor George Szell, the fearsome director of the Cleveland Orchestra when Fleisher first performed with him in 1954. This triumvirate, Schnabel, Szell and Fleisher, formed the artistic sensibility that has sustained the 83-year-old pianist throughout his long life.

The cathartic section of My Nine Lives traverses a period of 33 years, from age 36-69, when the fear and agony of a career interrupted by a crippling of the fourth and fifth fingers of his right hand forced Fleisher into semi-retirement from the concert stage. Fleisher recounts his frustration with incompetent quacks and well-meaning physicians and surgeons who hadn’t a clue about his disability or how to cure it. Eventually, a series of progressive Botox injection therapies provided a semi-cure, but always with the specter of a reccurrence, which was finally diagnosed as focal dystonia. In those years, Fleisher specialized in mastering the limited left hand solo and orchestral repertoire, and made a partial comeback by extensively performing Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand.

The personal side of Fleisher’s life – his three marriages, the loss of his administrative and teaching positions at Tanglewood when Seiji Ozawa peremptorily dismissed him in 1996, his depression over his hand affliction that made him contemplate suicide, and his triumphant return to the concert stage as a two-handed pianist after the Botox therapy succeeded are told candidly, and with confessional honesty.

The book is a remarkable testament, and is highly recommended for all classical music lovers. Triumph over adversity (or fate, if you want a Beethovenian take,) could well have served as perhaps a truer subtitle.

My Nine Lives; a memoir of Many Careers in Music, by Leon Fleisher and Anne Midgette, Doubleday; 2010. ISBN 978-0-385-52918-1. 325 pages. Hardcover.

– Steve Dankner