Music Media Monthly

Liszt as Transcriber, by Jonathan Kregor

Ravel Studies, edited by Deborah Mawer

Two recent books on Franz Liszt and Maurice Ravel–composers with vastly different personas but who both shared a love for compositional and performer virtuosity, and who often musically expressed the “dark side” of human nature–are the subjects of fascinating books this month, both published by Cambridge University Press.

Franz Liszt (1811-1886)–as virtuoso pianist and pedagogue, transcriber of both old and new music, composer and musical/philosophical progressive–cast a giant shadow over the 19^th century. In his most visible role as a concert pianist, Liszt transformed all he touched, taking music, and the attendant functions music served, to new levels of awareness, changing it forever in the minds of all who heard him perform. It was perhaps most especially his astounding transcriptions, which he made over a period of some 50 years, that left the greatest influence on his contemporaries; the author of the present book tells us that “roughly half of (Liszt’s) vast output relies on the music of other composers.”

In Liszt’s relatively long life, Kreger writes, he “met Beethoven and Claude Debussy (and) attended the premieres of (Berlioz’s) Symphony fantastique and (Wagner’s) Parsifal.” Think of the diversity of styles and the worlds of sound music traversed during those years, from Classicism to budding Impressionism. Liszt absorbed and channeled this panoply into his transcendent transcriptions – many of them expanded versions or re-imaginings of the source composers’ works. This is the boundary Liszt crossed: where an “arrangement” (usually a faithful note-by-note transferral to the keyboard of a non-piano source work) becomes, at an evolved level, a “transcription,” or as Liszt preferred to call his opera transcriptions, “paraphrases.” Transcriptions, in Liszt’s hands and in his imagination, thus become embellished works, sometimes notated in three or four staves, showcasing the expanded and more virtuosic parts for the superior pianist. Liszt took advantage of the increasingly sophisticated technology of piano manufacture during the early- to mid-19^th century and redefined the instrument through these works, with the piano becoming, in effect, a one-person orchestra.

Liszt as Transcriber is abundantly illustrated with musical examples of Liszt’s and others’ works, with excerpts of arrangements and transcriptions of works including Mozart‘s Requiem, several Beethoven symphonies, Schubert’s lieder, overtures by C.M v. Weber and Rossini, Wagner’s Tannhaüser and Tristan und Isolde, and Verdi‘s Requiem.

Given Liszt’s importance and lasting influence, this beautifully produced, excellently written and documented book will likely prove to be a useful–even necessary–addition to the personal libraries of pianists, students of the piano literature and researchers in the field of 19^th century music/Romanticism, and to institutional music libraries with collections in these areas. Highly recommended.

Liszt as Transcriber, by Jonathan Kregor, Cambridge University Press 2010. ISBN 978-0-521-11777-7. 299 pages, hardcover.

Ravel Studies, edited by Deborah Mawer, is a compendium of nine scholarly chapters about Maurice Ravel (1874-1937). The goal of the book is “through historical, critical, and analytical means,” to “reveal the symbiotic relationships between Ravel’s music and aesthetic, cultural, literary, gender, performance-based, and medical studies.”

The chapter titles are intriguing and may well prompt the reader to investigate further the obscure extra-musical pursuits of this revered French master, whose music has always been beloved by performers and audiences. Chapter titles such as “Erotic ambiguity in Ravel’s music,” “Enchantments and illusions: recasting the creation of L’Enfant et les sortilèges” and “Encountering La Valse: perspectives and pitfalls” suggest that there are hidden and unplumbed depths within Ravel’s music and psyche. The chapters are indeed illuminating – perhaps none more so than the final one, which recounts the backstory behind the composer’s tragic and still-mystifying death, “The longstanding fascination with ‘le cas Ravel.”

It does appear that Ravel was characterized by a certain shyness, reticence or disengagement that seemed at odds with the outward-looking effervescence, brilliance, virtuosity and child-like qualities of his most popular successes, such as Bolero, Piano Concerto in G and Ma mère l’oye. Yet a “dark side” to his personality is hinted at by works such as Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, La Valse, Valses nobles et sentimentales and Chansons madécasses. These suggest an underlying malaise beneath the stylish veneer of a dandy-ish, cosmopolitan, world-famous composer. As he grew older, and despite the early and easily achieved perfection of his neoclassical works, Ravel’s music began to reveal a pentimento of dark and latent tragedy – even morbid despair, as evidenced in the finale of his String Quartet in F, composed in 1903; it was subliminally there from the beginning.

Ravel loved jazz and had an abiding, mutually shared affection for his American confrere George Gershwin, whose Concerto in F, composed in 1925, provided the Frenchman with a model for his own two piano concertos of 1930/31. Editor Deborah Mawer’s “Crossing borders II: Ravel’s theory and practice of jazz” discusses the many intriguing intricacies of how late 19^th century/early 20^th century ragtime and early, 1920s-era jazz was viewed by Ravel’s contemporaries, and how it was consciously adapted for use within the classical forms. Mawer points out the subtleties of how Ravel was able to impart a French “accent” to these American vernacular idioms.

Ravel Studies is an outstanding addition to the Ravel literature and offers aficionados of French music, students, musicologists, and sophisticated music lovers a series of concise, yet  in-depth and thoughtful essays about the music, life and times of this great master. Libraries with collections in these subject areas will also want to purchase the book. Highly recommended.

Ravel Studies, edited by Deborah Mawer, Cambridge University Press 2010. ISBN 978-0-521-88697-0. 220 pages, hardcover.

– Steve Dankner

Arnold Schoenberg, by Bojan Bujic. Phaidon Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-7148-4614-9. 240 pages, hardcover, with 80 black and white illustrations.

Having read and reviewed three recent books on Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) within the last several years, I have to wonder from whence the interest in this still much-misunderstood 20^th century master emanates.

I’d venture a guess that—not as much heard as analyzed, respected but not loved by conservative classical aficionados —Schoenberg’s former infamy has transmogrified to grudging acceptance by mainstream audiences. Hence, the need to know more about him and his legacy: transitioning from post-Mahler/Strauss/Busoni acolyte to boundary-breaking Expressionist; from free atonalist to conjuring the 12-tone method; from early mentor to Webern and Berg in Berlin and Vienna to escaping Hitler, emigrating to America and becoming a professor at the University of Southern California and at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Reading Bujic’s wonderfully evocative biography, “respected but not loved” seems to be the running theme throughout Schoenberg’s career. The composer struggled mightily to create what he saw as a progressive style, building upon Bach and Brahms. Key to this difficulty was the inability of Schoenberg’s mature works to convince audiences that what they heard was the logical extension of Brahms and Mahler, with the use of “continuing variation” trumping literal, comforting repetition. Clearly, it was “the emancipation of the dissonance,” organized into a systematized modus operandi (the twelve-tone method) that proved the stumbling block. Perhaps Schoenberg went too far, in demanding so much of listeners, to ever achieve popular acceptance.

Bujic addresses exactly this point when he writes, “At the close of the 16^th century, Renaissance artists had been deliberately searching for a quality of ‘difficulty,’ believing that the effort needed to surmount it gave rise to virtue. Schoenberg’s attitude had a distant affinity with this – especially where it concerned the synthesis of the aesthetic and the ethical.”

Schoenberg’s opinion of Stravinsky’s Neoclassicism, post-“Pulcinella” (1920) proves the point from the opposite perspective: “(Schoenberg) saw in Stravinsky’s new conservatism a capitulation, a refusal to think the task of composition through, and a facile appropriation of stylistic properties of a past age as though from a box of props.”

As he saw himself the inheritor and promulgator of the great and noble Austro-German classical tradition, it becomes sad to trace the gradual disillusionment Schoenberg felt, as he lived long enough to see that tradition die a slow but inevitable death after two World Wars, Hitler and anti-Semitism, and a “coarsening of the culture” as typified by the “trickster” Stravinsky, with Schoenberg entering old age, living in Southern California and feeling as a displaced person. In a 1946 letter to the painter Oskar Kokoschka, Schoenberg wrote: “You complain of lack of culture in this amusement-arcade world. I wonder what you’d say to the world in which I nearly die of disgust.”

This book, more effectively than others I’ve recently read on Schoenberg, tears at you, as it gets to his heart, mind, and soul. Beautifully written and deeply moving, I’d recommend it especially to those who truly want to understand Schoenberg – to get beyond the façade of aloofness, “difficulty” and the veneer of intellectual and moral rigor he assumed – to approach the man himself. This is a biography; thankfully, there are no turgid musical analyses and post-Schenkerian graphs to wade through, and it is written with compassion; all the better to see the man behind the self-protective mask of severity.

This is beautifully made book, as are all Phaidon publications, and it’s filled with wonderful photographs (Schoenberg with Einstein and Leopold Godowsky; with Francis Poulenc [!], and with Charlie Chaplin), among many others.

My only criticism is that the font is too small for nearsighted and aged eyes, requiring close and somewhat strained reading. This book would make a most worthy addition to every music library with contemporary music and composer biography collections.

James Levine—40 Years at the Metropolitan Opera, compiled by the editorial staff at Amadeus Press, 2011. ISBN 978-1-57467-196-4. 230 pages, softcover, with color and B&W photos throughout.

Now, with the recent resignation of James Levine as conductor and Music Director of the Boston Symphony and the cancellation of most of his Metropolitan Opera duties for the remainder of this season due to persistent ill health, comes a book celebrating his 40-year legacy at that institution. It’s hard to imagine a more emotional tribute to the man who literally re-invented the Met. The reminiscences now seem tinged with sadness, as the Maestro’s infirmities over the past several years have taken their toll, and have forced him into near-retirement.

James Levine—40 Years at the Metropolitan Opera is a lovingly assembled tome, consisting of historic photographs, commentary by Levine, and interviews with the panoply of singers who worked with him for four decades.

The book—a stunningly handsome coffee table keepsake for opera lovers—is organized by decade, beginning with Levine’s first performance at the Met conducting Tosca, starring Grace Bumbry and Franco Corelli, and ending with his last documented work, Das Rheingold, in September, 2010, starring Bryn Terfel and Stephanie Blythe.

Martin Bernheimer, Harvey Sachs, Richard Dyer, Ara Guzelimian, and others punctuate the book with critical and perceptive essays honoring Levine.

Whatever his imminent future on the podium, it is touching to read James Levine’s last words, which are a postscript to the history the book so lovingly documents. “For an American kid, the Met has always been an opera mecca temple. I made it a prime life commitment.”

Music libraries with opera and/or musical theatre collections will want to purchase this beautiful and moving volume of tributes to one of the greatest conductors of the last 100 years—a musician who has already passed into legend.

– Steve Dankner

Chamber Music – a Listener’s Guide, by James M. Keller

Chamber Music – a Listener’s Guide is a well-thought-out and excellently written reference work for the traditional music lover, avid listener, or concertgoer. 56 composers’ works are covered in moderate depth, with a sprinkling of biographical data, followed by a program note on the particular work at hand. A nice touch is the set of “who, what, when, where, why” factoids and instrumentation notes that introduces each work. The commentaries also include notes on the critical reception of the works in question on the part of the composers’ colleagues and music critics.

This is a rather old-fashioned, though still useful text, focusing on the unvarnished masterpieces of classical music. Many of the canonical works are discussed here: 17 of Brahms‘ 24 chamber pieces; many works by Haydn and Mozart, of course; popular pieces such as the Arensky Piano Trio No. 1 in D Minor, Grieg’s string quartet, and so on. A very few fairly recent works by Osvaldo Golijov, George Crumb and Joan Tower are covered. But it’s the “old masters” that get the lion’s share of attention, which is fair, given the author’s intent.

One wonders what the future holds for books like this one, which is basically a compendium of program notes, in these days of the Web and its incomparable reach. Yes, of course — inaccuracies abound online. What with Wikipedia and the unfiltered scope of Google, you can’t trust what pops up in your search engine. You can trust Keller, though. A former program annotator for the New York Philharmonic and San Francisco Symphony, he is a very readable writer, and to his credit, his notes are well researched and have a point of view that details the backstory of the piece under discussion; there are relatively few arcane, analytical/technical digressions to slow down or sidetrack the narrative. In the end, reading Keller’s engaging notes makes you want to hear the piece — a sure sign of good, descriptive music writing.

A very similar book, though, and still in print, is Melvin Berger’s Guide to Chamber Music, first published in 1985 and reprinted by Dover in 2001. Berger’s Guide… serves the same purpose and isn’t out of date (Berger is writing about essentially the same works). Given the choice, I would go for Keller’s, as the text is less academically discursive and more personal than Berger’s, though there are more similarities than contrasts between the two. Recommended.

Chamber Music – a Listener’s Guide by James M. Keller. Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-19-538253-2. 494 pages, hardcover

The Music of Painting – Music, Modernism and the Visual Arts from the Romantics to John Cage, by Peter Vergo

Once in a while a book comes along in which ideas coalesce in new and transformative ways. Such is the case with Peter Vergo’s The Music of Painting – Music, Modernism and the Visual Arts from the Romantics to John Cage. Vergo’s insights into the creative worlds of painting and music are truly revelatory and will delight the reader.

Vergo, a Professor of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex, England, is an expert on German and Austrian art, and has previously written books about Wassily Kandinsky and art in Vienna, among others. Kandinsky was a polymath: a painter, playwright and art theorist. In essence, he was the first modern painter to develop abstraction. The dialogue between him and the composer Arnold Schoenberg who was also a painter, led to seminal breakthroughs in formulating modes of abstraction and the Expressionist aesthetic in both music and visual art in the years just prior to World War I.

Vergo touches on these interactions, but there is much more in this exploratory book than early 20^th century art. The author’s focus is broad-ranging, beginning with the music dramas of Richard Wagner and his revolutionary influence on Baudelaire, the Impressionist painters (particularly Seurat and Gauguin), Claude Debussy and many others.

Regarding the cross-pollination of aesthetics between music and painting, Gauguin is quoted: “Using the pretext of any kind of subject matter borrowed from life or from nature, by arranging lines and colors I obtain symphonies, harmonies…”

Vergo also refers to the music of earlier times when he traces the influence of each art upon the other, creating a composite duality, such as in the case of J.S. Bach, about whom he quotes Pierre Boulez: “I would go so far as to say that they (Bach’s canons) offer almost more sustenance for the eye than for the ear.”

There is much more that Vergo elucidates: James McNeil Whistler’s “harmonies,” “nocturnes,” symphonies” and “variations” (the titles of his paintings); Skryabin and his ‘color symphony’ Prometheus: The Poem of Fire; Messiaen’s synesthesia-influenced music; the relationship and mutual influence of Picasso and Stravinsky; the influence of jazz and “boogie-woogie” on Piet Mondriaan; Calder’s influence on Cage, Earle Brown and Morton Feldman, and on and on – the myriad influences of music on painters, and painting on composers.

We are a long way here from Walter Pater’s dictum “All art aspires towards the condition of music.” After reading Vergo, one understands that music and visual art are, or at least can be, truly symbiotic.

The Music of Painting… is a lavishly produced book, as are all Phaidon publications. There are ample illustrations of both painting and music, though I wish there were even more, to match the full extent of the visual art references. This is a book to study and contemplate, not to read quickly, but to savor. Libraries with sections on general music history, aesthetics and philosophy and contemporary art and music (it belongs in both subject areas) would do well to add this necessary volume to their collections. Most highly recommended.

The Music of Painting – Music, Modernism and the Visual Arts from the Romantics to John Cage, by Peter Vergo. Phaidon Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-7148-5762-6. 367 pages, hardcover.

– Steve Dankner

The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess – a 75^th Anniversary Celebration by Robin Thompson

In my February blog, I admitted to being “a devotee of all things George.” I admit that I can’t resist any and all new books that appear on the Gershwins, and so I offer yet another review on the latest – a case study on Porgy and Bess.

It’s really a double case study, offering the “life and times” not only of Porgy…, but also of George, sandwiched in between the story of the opera’s genesis. As such, the book could lay claim to being a good all-around primer on George, chronicling his life story as a “journey to greatness” (to quote the title of a well-worn Gershwin biography by David Ewen) – the inevitable fabulous destination culminating in the composition of Porgy and Bess in 1935, its critical reception to mixed reviews, successful re-birth with national tours beginning in 1936 and it’s belated, but inevitably triumphant acclaim by worldwide audiences.

I found The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess – a 75^th Anniversary Celebration to be, overall, an excellent and comprehensive recounting of the creation of this landmark opera/musical theatre masterwork. Porgy… is covered in great depth, from its genesis as a novel by DuBose Heyward, published in 1925, to its subsequent transformation as a play two years later, co-adapted by Heyward and his wife, the playwright Dorothy Heyward. Gershwin, who read the novel upon its publication, immediately wrote Heyward of his desire to compose an opera based upon it.

There were many obstacles to overcome. Conceived by Gershwin as a “folk opera” in the grand operatic tradition (think Carmen,) it eventually, due to its length, was cut to fit into the mold of a more conventional musical theatre extravaganza, adapted for Broadway, not opera audiences. Other impediments: casting at a time when there were few classically trained black singers; Gershwin’s need to obtain further study to gain the skills and confidence necessary to tackle the task of composing a full-length opera, and his conflicting commitments to compose other current and future Broadway musicals. All told, it was a 10-year wait. Porgy and Bess finally opened in New York in October 1935. The rest, as they say, is history.

The book also includes full biographical and career information on Gershwin, and concludes with a well-documented chapter: “The First 75 Years Begins,” chronicling the triumph of Porgy… throughout its many successive European tours and American revivals, from 1936 to the present.

If there are flaws in the book, they lie in the editing, which is often lax, and with occasional misspellings, e.g.“Hayden” for Haydn. The MacDowell (artist) Colony, where the Heywards met and subsequently collaborated on Porgy… over a period of three years, is said to be in Vermont, not New Hampshire, etc.

Do these ruin the book? No. This is a trade, coffee-table tome, well-designed and -produced, with plenty of great photographs, letters and other documentation that are both fun and illuminating to pore over. I enjoyed it and learned some things I didn’t know about Porgy and Bess and its artistic trajectory over the years.

The book would be a worthy addition for music libraries with extensive Gershwin, musical theatre or opera collections, and of course will appeal to the many individual Gershwin fans like me, who never can get enough of George, even in the re-telling of Gershwin lore. Recommended.

The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess – a 75^th Anniversary Celebration by Robin Thompson. Amadeus Press, 2010. ISBN 978-1-57467-191-9. 190 pages, hardbound.

Modern Music and After, 3rd edition by Paul Griffiths

Since 1945, contemporary modernist music has been a minefield of warring factions and conflicting, often passionate finger-pointing, with all parties seeking the right pathway(s), as Pound and Joyce dictated, to “make it new.”

Paul Griffiths, in the third edition of his now-classic text Modern Music and After, leads us through virtually all of the major style periods since 1945 and brings clarity to the subject. There have been many new directions: building on 12-tone music, leading to serialism, resulting in total control of all “parameters” of music, guided by Pierre Boulez, Iannis Xenakis and Milton Babbitt. Then there were contrary directions: a radical relinquishing of control in the music and silence of John Cage via Zen procedures; the creation of electronic music and minimalism in its several forms: “holy” (Arvo Pärt, Henryk Gorecki and John Tavener) and secular (Terry Riley, Philip Glass). New directions, such as maximalism (Brian Ferneyhough, Michael Finnissy) and spectral music (Horatiu Radulesco, James Tenney, Gerard Grisey and Claude Vivier,) as well as dedicated chapters on the music and aesthetics of Luciano Berio, Elliott Carter and Olivier Messiaen. All these and many other genres, subgenres, and composers are surveyed.

Griffiths organizes Modern Music… by focusing on trends that evolved over the past 65 years. He selects a few key years where a landmark work was created, pointing composers in a clearly new, or culminating direction. In Griffiths’ view, 1945, 1956, 1965, 1975, 1989 were such years.

The author admits that the great bulk of this music, which he clearly cherishes, will never be made known to the traditional classical music lover: “The subject matter of this book remains virtually unknown to … people for whom the experience of Western classical music is a regular necessity.” And again, “The achievement of the 18^th and 19^th centuries remains the great sun of the Western musical solar system… In the labyrinth of contemporary music, however, no Ariadne’s thread of common practice is to be found, while the audience has similarly lost whatever unanimity it might have had.”

Griffiths has done an outstanding job of making this music at least intellectually accessible. It is our job as listeners, if we seriously care, to seek it out and try to encounter it on its own terms.

Highly recommended for libraries with sections on new music, composition, music theory and contemporary aesthetics/philosophy.

Modern Music and After, 3rd edition by Paul Griffiths. Oxford University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-19-974050-5. 456 pages, softcover.

– Steve Dankner

George Gershwin by Larry Starr

It’s hard to imagine another 20^th century composer who has been the inspiration for research as recurrently as George Gershwin. Of recent vintage, Edward Jablonski’s 1987 Gershwin and Howard Pollack’s 2006 George Gershwin: His Life and Work are the major studies. It’s not that there isn’t a need for re-interpretation based on continuing investigative scholarship – after all, there are always new books on Beethoven, Mozart and Bach being published. So, why not Gershwin? It’s simply that, in Gershwin’s case, the field has been plowed to the point where the likelihood of unearthing trenchant new data seems unlikely. One reason is that Gershwin’s life was brief and his classic concert works, from “Rhapsody in Blue” to “Porgy and Bess” were very few: we’re talking about a creative period spanning eleven years, from 1924 to 1935, covering about a dozen works in all.

The question is, can we really expect to learn more about Gershwin and his music and reassess his work and achievement in new ways? Surprisingly, the answer is yes. Author Larry Starr has taken a fresh approach, charting Gershwin’s trajectory as a composer primarily of theatre music, not as the composer of 1920s-‘30s jazz-inflected concert music. Starr’s method is both novel and logical. Of the Gershwin books I’ve read–I’m a devotee of all things George, and have read dozens of books about him and his music over many years–this is about the only serious study that focuses on the day-to-day side of Gershwin as songwriter and musical comedy/theatre composer, which, after all, is how Gershwin spent most of his creative life; the concert works in actuality represent a sort of sidebar to his main activities in the world of show music.

Starr’s approach illuminates Gershwin’s growth as a creative artist in a more linear way, as the author allows us to follow Gershwin’s own creative path, with the Broadway shows “Oh Kay,” “Strike Up the Band,” “Lady, Be Good!” and “Of Thee I Sing” – finally leading to his masterpiece “Porgy and Bess,” completed in 1935 – two years before Gershwin’s untimely death. Seen in this light, “Porgy…”is revealed as the culmination of Gershwin’s Broadway/musical theatre career, which, of course, it is.

To be comprehensive, Starr includes a chapter entitled “Entr’acte – the Showman in the Concert Hall,” and artfully discusses how Gershwin created a populist “classical” style by merging “the formal principles…in “An American in Paris” (with its) ’blues’ and ‘Charleston’ sections… as filling in the roles as slow movement or dance movement (or scherzo), respectively, within the multipartite whole.”

Of course, it was these populist elements in Gershwin’s concert works and in the grand opera “Porgy and Bess” (“I Got Plenty ‘o Nuthin’” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So”) that confused and alienated critics unfamiliar with, or dismissive of, Gershwin’s Broadway styles.

Starr’s George Gershwin will not, and is not intended to, replace earlier, more comprehensive “life and times” studies. It does, though, provide a fresh look at Gershwin through the lens of his gifts as a master song craftsman and musical theatre innovator and collaborator at a crucial time in the development of this sui generis American popular art form. George Gershwin is therefore a welcome addition to the extensive Gershwin literature, and belongs in every music library with a comprehensive American music/musical theatre collection. Highly recommended.

George Gershwin by Larry Starr. Yale University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-300-11184-2; hardcover, 194 pages.

The New York Philharmonic – from Bernstein to Maazel by John Canarina

In many ways, the New York Philharmonic, America’s oldest orchestra, founded in 1842, fills the role of our national orchestra.  Those mature enough (I don’t use the word “old”) to recall the thrilling and wonderfully illuminating “Young People’s Concerts,” televised in the 1950s and ‘60s with the articulate and charismatic maestro Leonard Bernstein will likely agree. For most of us – baby boomers and beyond – this was our introduction to the glamorous world of classical music. Taking us from Carnegie Hall to Lincoln Center, this book is a wonderful companion and travelogue.

John Canarina’s The New York Philharmonic is a continuation of the history of this great orchestra; Howard Shanet’s earlier study, published in 1975, ended with the 1970-’71 season, just before the ascendancy of Pierre Boulez.

Reading Canarina’s handsomely produced book, filled with photographs of past glories, allows us to relive those treasured moments. Highlights include the opening of Lincoln Center, concert tours, and the panoply of world-famous guest conductors and soloists who have created this history. The author frames his chapters with the successive change of guard by the New York Philharmonic’s conductors, and how the orchestra variously responded to the leadership of Pierre Boulez, Zubin Mehta, Kurt Masur and Lorin Maazel. There are some sad stories recounted here – especially the treatment of some of these maestros by the New York press, which in a few instances, has been hardly less than devastating to the reputations of Mazur and Maazel, in particular.

Canarina brings his considerable skills as chronicler to bear in the telling of the ups and downs and the blossoming of this mighty orchestra under these maestros. An assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic who worked under Leonard Bernstein, Canarina knows both the history and backstories of the NYP intimately, and conveys them in print with the charm of an advocate, but also with the “inside track” of a mystery writer. The result is a book that is comprehensive but also fun to read. For devotees of the NYP, it’s wonderful to go back in time to relive favorite concerts.

Libraries with collections that include musical biographies, anecdotal musical memoirs and such will find The New York Philharmonic a worthy addition. This is a book written for the devoted music lover or orchestra hound, without technical knowledge of music. Recommended.

The New York Philharmonic – from Bernstein to Maazel by John Canarina. Amadeus Press, 2010. ISBN 978-1-57467-188-9; hardcover, 483 pages.

– Steve Dankner

Working with Bernstein – a memoir by Jack Gottlieb

Leonard Bernstein at Work – his final years - photographs by Steve J. Sherman

There were three great composers who created and thus changed the course of early-to mid-20^th century American classical music: George Gershwin, Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein – each beloved by music lovers then, now and forever. Gershwin and Copland are ingrained in the American psyche as populists (discounting Copland’s austere early and late works). Time has been good to all three, notwithstanding the criticism of hindsight that, for reasons of political correctness, rudely deconstructs works such as Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, Copland’s A Lincoln Portrait and Bernstein’s The Age of Anxiety (Symphony No. 2). Happily, this music continues to live.

Regarding Bernstein: through his recordings (a staggering 826 in all), remastered videos and DVDs of the New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concerts and his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard (published collectively as The Unanswered Question), not to mention his own music, Bernstein has bequeathed a far-reaching legacy that ensures his immortality – to a degree I believe that will ultimately, if it hasn’t already, exceed Gershwin’s or Copland’s. As long as Brahms, Mahler et al. are listened to, Bernstein’s name and legacy as interpreter, at least, will survive.

Leonard Bernstein required and bestowed love through conducting, composition and teaching, which in his case were three manifestations of the same impulse. This drive to teach, yet continually to question, in essence defines him. Bernstein was also a man who lived and worked in the overexposed klieg light of our insatiable mass media culture. He needed it, and thrived because of it, and it needed him.

Both the private and public sides of this giant of American music are made visible in these two wonderful books: Working with Bernstein – a memoir by Jack Gottlieb and Leonard Bernstein at Work – his final years - photographs by Steve J. Sherman. For Bernstein aficionados – and they are legion – both the internal, day-to-day workings of the Maestro’s musical projects and business affairs in diary format and the external, public glamour and triumph of his podium persona in black and white imagery reveal Bernstein, man and artist, in an almost tactile way that traditional biographies do not. Read in sequence, which I recommend, they bookend Bernstein’s multi-faceted life.

Jack Gottlieb, author of Working with Bernstein, is a composer, and for thirteen years was Bernstein’s “musical assistant.” He served as gatekeeper, examining new scores submitted for Bernstein’s review, helped with research on the scripts for Bernstein’s television programs for Omnibus and the New York Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concerts, and maintained Bernstein’s music library and kept files on every score, including its performance history, timings, and soloists for concerti. Gottlieb also was Bernstein’s driver, travel agent, link with publishers, artists’ representatives and orchestra managers and functioned as majordomo to Bernstein in almost every other way.

As musical assistant, enabler and fly-on-the wall, Gottlieb had the inside track on the life – public and private – that Bernstein led. What makes this book essential is the author’s frequently humorous writing style, combined with the reverence Gottlieb continues to have for Bernstein, which saves it from being either a recondite catalog of events or veering into a scandalous tell-all.

Gottlieb prepared many of the program notes for concert performance, record jackets, essays and scores. Part Two of his book reprints these and adds commentary on all of Bernstein’s original compositions and texts that Bernstein wrote (such as for the ‘Kaddish’ Symphony No. 3). The text is also replete with musical examples, concert programs, et al. As a comprehensive study of Bernstein’s oeuvre, Working with Bernstein is exceptional.

If Working with Bernstein is the “alpha” of the Bernstein story, representing the Maestro beginning in 1958 at the height of his success, with his appointment as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic, Steve J. Sherman’s Leonard Bernstein at Work – his final years is the “omega,” and reveals, in a lavishly produced coffee table-sized tome, stunning photographic imagery – the burnished glory of Bernstein’s last seven years, from 1984-1990.

Author/photographer Steve J. Sherman is clearly a superb visual documentarian of classical music’s elite performing artists, having worked in this capacity for Carnegie Hall and the New York Times. Focusing on Bernstein during his last seven years, the photographer has captured some 200 images – most candid, some posed – of Bernstein conducting, and in the post-concert green room with fellow musicians and celebrities, during twenty different events in New York, with the New York, Israel and Vienna Philharmonic orchestras and the Chicago Symphony. Commentary by symphony musicians and celebrity soloists accompanies each photo, capturing in often-heartfelt quotes the essence of what Bernstein has meant to each person. The cumulative effect is deeply moving and, at the end, disturbing; the photographs depict Bernstein both at his most unselfconsciously, joyously exuberant and in moments of troubled pensivity, post-performance, when his emphysema was in full force.  These photos capture him alone and vulnerable  – and clearly in physical pain.

These photographs are truly “worth 1000 words” and more. Bernstein lived in the moment, and these 200 moments thankfully have been recorded for posterity. To truly understand him, you had to be there, to hear him conduct. This is the next best thing and is a book to cherish – a visual encapsulation of all that he was.

Both Working with Bernstein – a memoir by Jack Gottlieb and Leonard Bernstein at Work – his final years - photographs by Steve J. Sherman are very highly recommended and belong in every music library. As mentioned, read them both for a full appreciation of Leonard Bernstein’s genius. Then, listen to his recording(s) of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (‘Resurrection’) – either or both the 1963 or 1988 versions.

Working with Bernstein – a memoir by Jack Gottlieb. 2010 Amadeus Press. 370 pages. ISBN 978-1-57467-186-5.

Leonard Bernstein at Work – his final years – photographs by Steve J. Sherman. 2010 Amadeus Press. 170 pages. ISBN 978-1-57467-190-2.

– Steve Dankner

Why Mahler?  How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed Our World by Norman Lebrecht

Regarded primarily as a conductor during his brief lifetime, the tides of Gustav Mahler’s fortunes as a composer have advanced, slowly but surely, over the past 100 years, largely via the championing of his works, especially after the Second World War, by the great mid-century maestros Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, Leonard Bernstein, and more recently, Simon Rattle, Pierre Boulez, and Vladimir Ashkenazi, to name only some of the most visible. Mahler is, at present, the most-performed and likely best-loved symphonist — even surpassing Beethoven.

Mahler himself predicted his eventual acceptance and triumph as a composer. Referring to the oft-times scandalous success of Richard Strauss, with whom he had a friendly rivalry, Mahler stated, “My time will come when his is over.” And, he was right, more or less. The reasons are not hard to understand.

Mahler, the man and his extravagant music seem tailor-made to serve as a backdrop against our conflicted 21^st-century lives and times: if you’ve sinned and desire mercy; if you’ve been remiss about going to religious services; if you are mired in the world and are beset by dizzying, pointless activity — there is forgiveness, understanding and release: listen to Mahler. The composer, building upon the spiritual sustenance that Bach and Beethoven offer us, provides, if not actual redemption, at least a metaphorical musical answer to our need for sympathy and absolution. The benediction to “go thou and sin no more” seems implicit at the conclusion of each of Mahler’s exhaustive symphonies.

Other iconic composers have a devoted following among music lovers; Mahler’s listeners are acolytes, true believers worshiping at the shrine. And they have all the documentation they need to follow in the footsteps of the great man, from the published diaries of Alma Mahler and the gargantuan four-volume Gustav Mahler mega-biography by Henry-Louis de La Grange (Volume IV alone is over 1000 pages), to the more modest Bard Music Festival “Mahler and His World,” published in 2003 and many others. There’s a Mahler biography for everyone.

Among the best I’ve read is the just-published Why Mahler? How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed Our World by Norman Lebrecht. Modest in size at 265 pages, the book is enormously readable yet comprehensive. Lebrecht has an uncanny ability to seemingly place you in the midst of Mahler’s world, a fly on the wall, privy to critical as well as everyday conversations and interactions between friends, family, colleagues and foes. An example: “On February 5 Mahler attends the Rosé Quartet’s premiere of Schoenberg’s ‘String Quartet,’Op. 7… Some listeners object, whistling into their front-door keys. ‘How dare you whistle while I’m applauding?’ shouts Mahler. ‘I whistled at your filthy symphony, too’ cries a heckler.’”

This is a book filled with love as well as awe for Mahler, the man and his music, with sympathy for his professional, personal and artistic struggles: Mahler’s unhappy marriage, his trials with the outrageously anti-Semitic Vienna press, his battles with the Vienna State Opera and later, with the New York Philharmonic’s Board of Directors — all told via documentary testimony. It makes for harrowing reading, and as a result, the book is a page-turner. A worthy addition to the exhaustive Mahler literature, it deserves an honored place on every Mahler aficionado’s, and music library bookshelf. My highest recommendation.

Why Mahler? How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed Our World by Norman Lebrecht, Random House, 2010; hardcover. ISBN No. 978-0-375-42381-9.

Listen to This by Alex Ross

Alex Ross, since 1996 music critic for The New Yorker magazine, is among the best writers on classical music today. His first book, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, published in 2008, is already acknowledged a classic. Ross follows that success with Listen to This, a collection of 19 essays; all but one are elaborated New Yorker articles. The depth Ross provides on topics as wide-ranging as Marian Anderson, Mozart, Brahms, Radiohead, Bob Dylan, Music from Marlboro and more offers much musical food for thought. Even if you’ve read these columns in their original form, the writing holds up so well that they deserve a permanent life in book form.

To be sure, Ross is a critic, but he is more — a commentator on current trends and often, subcultures within the nominally classical music scene. His view is also more global, ranging beyond the New York City landscape –though, eventually all musical roads lead to New York. Ross possesses a rare gift for a critic: there is no trace of cynicism or meanness in him, and no “axe to grind” on behalf of favored composers, soloists and styles.

Listen to This confirms Ross’s skills as a musician and writer of substance and depth. Among the chapters — one of my favorites — is a profoundly moving essay on Brahms (“Blessed are the Sad“) which uncovers a great deal about the difficult nature of this ur-classicist; he was not a simple man, and the layers of complexity in his musical makeup reveals a lot about both Brahms as well as Ross, the historian who revels in “Brahms’ deliciously complex relationship with Wagner.”

The book serves a different purpose than The Rest is Noise, which is a chronology of 20^th-century music. Listen to This invites a more relaxed, occasional reading experience, not unlike the essays of Donald J. Tovey, who also wrote insightfully and with great lucidity on both classical and contemporary musical issues.

Listen to This is written for the amateur music lover as well as the professional musician. Its warm, inviting manner and the keen intellect that Ross brings to bear will both charm and stimulate the reader. A worthy companion to The Rest is Noise, this book, like Lebrecht’s Why Mahler?… reviewed above, is highly recommended, and belongs in the essays/music history collections in every music library.

Listen to This by Alex Ross, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010; hardcover. ISBN No. 978-0-374-18774-3.

Danse Macabre by Gerald Elias

Attention music and mystery lovers: If you love mysteries, suspense thrillers, whodunits and catch-me-if-you can capers, with crusty hardboiled characters – and if you’re a classical music lover with a passion for the lore of rare violins crafted by the likes of Stradivarius and Guarneri – you’ll be right in your element with the just-published Danse Macabre, by Boston Symphony violinist and gifted writer Gerald Elias. He’s penned two previous novels (the first, Devil’s Trill, was published in 2009) that offer an insider’s view of the world of classical music performance and teaching. Here Elias’ protagonist Daniel Jacobus is a blind, hardboiled violin pedagogue who’s been recruited because of his expertise in priceless violins to become a reluctant undercover sleuth to ferret out the killer who’s murdered a world-famous violin soloist. Meticulously plotted, but with enough convolutions in the narrative to satisfy the most jaded mystery aficionado, Elias’ novel is driven by brilliant, snappy and sharp-witted dialog. The classical world is the milieu, but its surface refinement is not the story here. The pace is fast and the adventure gritty, with a harrowing opening. The action takes place on the streets and the subterranean levels of New York City. The addition of forbidden sexual escapades and the perils of rock superstardom are sub-themes that add depth, danger and a contemporary flavor. Do the bad guys win in the end? In our jaded, postmodern times, they likely would, for crime, as we know, often does pay. Find out for yourself; get your copy of this action-packed musical thriller.  Danse Macabre is a real page-turner that constitutes a new take on the mystery-murder novel: the musical whodunit. My highest recommendation.

Dance Macabre by Gerald Elias. Minotaur Books. 2010, hardcover. ISBN 978-0-312-62282-4; 278 pages. $24.99. For more information, visit the author’s website: geraldelias.com.

The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays by Richard Taruskin

Performing musicians, musicologists, and also serious, well-read music lovers are undoubtedly familiar with Richard Taruskin’s writing. Taruskin’s knowledge of art music is exhaustive, especially on the subject of Russian music: he’s the author of Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, Defining Russia Musically and On Russian Music. At the same time, Taruskin’s knowledge of the depth and breadth of art music across time and style periods is literally encyclopedic: he is the sole author of The Oxford History of Western Music, an essential six-volume compendium that is unique as the product of one person’s unparalled musical erudition and vision.

For the last twenty years, Taruskin has ventured beyond academia (he holds the Class of 1955 Chair of Music at the University of California at Berkeley,) and has written music criticism for leading newspapers, such as the New York Times, as well as critical essays for learned society journals. His topics of interest cover an immense spectrum: from contemporary music composition (postmodernism is a favorite subject) the mythmaking that attends classical performer superstars, the politics of musical style – both in and outside the university – and much more.

The great thing about Taruskin’s writing is that it’s so eminently readable – often even colloquial. And he always has a point of view – a potentially infuriating edge to his thought processes, so that one is never in doubt where he stands on any subject. This “edge” is the source of the ire that many who take issue with Taruskin’s judgments feel; the typical scholarly reserve and equivocation is never present in the 42 essays that comprise “The Danger of Music; instead, we often get, along with the laser beam-like insight and brilliance, lots of – dare I say – piss and vinegar. It’s a verbal slap in the face, certainly, and great fun to read, especially considering the source.

In an essay entitled “Only Time Will Cover the Taint,” which is about (not) performing Richard Wagner’s music in Israel, Taruskin writes: “The fact that pork is not kosher is no reflection on the pigs…the ban sanctifies its observers… take your pick of bigots.” Taruskin thus excoriates Tchaikovsky, Pierre Monteux, Mussorgsky – even Stravinsky – as closet anti-Semites, along with Wagner.

In another essay, “’Nationalism’ – Colonialism in Disguise,” Taruskin’s bile spills out to engulf Dvorak and Aaron Copland: “Some American composers have successfully traded on it (nationalism) the way Dvorak did, particularly a greatly gifted left-leaning homosexual Jew from Brooklyn… who managed to confect out of Paris and Stravinsky an ingratiating white-bread-out-of-the-prairie idiom that could be applied ad libitum to the higher forms of art.” Wow. Makes your hair stand on end.

No doubt Taruskin, in these essays, punctures and deflates icons. A few readers may concur; many will be outraged by Taruskin’s quasi-invective.

I found the essays exhilarating and refreshing, forcing me to come to terms with the author’s point of view – or not. Quite a fast ride on the musical precipice, I’d say, and worth it. Taruskin never takes up his acid-dipped pen to placate purists or the armchair music lover who takes solace from the “classics,” or the purveyors and believers in the “Great Chain of Being” theory of music history as canonical hero worship. Taruskin, who is a sort of radical Tom Paine of music, rolls up his shirtsleeves and attacks you bare-fisted, with no holds barred.

My advice? Take a chance and spar with him. Be warned – you might need a cold shower afterwards. You’ll certainly find your musical beliefs and values challenged, but the upside is that Taruskin’s defiance will get your heart and brain racing. Highly recommended across the board, for both the musically orthodox and the extremist.

The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays by Richard Taruskin. University of California Press, 2009. Hardback. ISBN 978-0-520-249776. 488 pages.

– Steve Dankner

The Jazz Image – Seeing Music through Herman Leonard’s Photography, by K. Heather Pinson

I have to admit that I have two connections to this book that have drawn me in, captivated and enthralled me: I know the subject, the eminent jazz/photojournalist photographer Herman Leonard (though only slightly,) and possess one of his classic photos – an amazing candid shot of Ella Fitzgerald singing at the Downbeat Club, on 52^nd Street in Manhattan, taken in 1949, with Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman and Richard Rodgers seated, enthralled, at a bistro table not ten feet from the great singer; and, I am myself a professional photographer, (in addition to being a composer).

Do these circumstances constrain my objectivity in reviewing this book? On the contrary, they engage my interest and provide a window into the world of bebop, the great musical artists who created it, and how it came to be that Leonard was the right man at the right time to capture and document musical history in the making at a crucial time in post-War America, from 1945-1950, as it – and we – entered the Modern era.

The book documents the rise of bebop as seen through Herman Leonard’s probing lens, which Ms. Pinson deconstructs, through her persuasive powers of analysis, into subject areas that lie beneath the surface image. Successive chapters delve deeply into the social and psychological layers of the photographs: The Jazz Image in Visual Culture, Signs (and symbols) in Jazz Photography and a “Style Portrait” of the (jazz) Avant-Garde. All are elucidating, perceptive, highly analytical and contribute much to our understanding of these musical giants, while miraculously – for a text such as this – neither disturb nor “explain away” their mystique and power to captivate audiences 60 years later with the power of their genius.

Ms. Pinson has accomplished a great deal, providing a keen and perceptive eye into a portal that jazz aficionados, and hopefully, many others seriously interested in mid-20^th century American musical culture will read, illuminating that crucial transitional time in our history.

We owe much to Herman Leonard and his confrere photographers for preserving this uniquely American legacy; and Heather Pinson’s book is the perfect accompaniment to an evening spent listening to jazz classics performed by such as Dizzy Gillespie or Dexter Gordon. For serious study of the iconography of jazz – its social importance and deep meaning, The Jazz Image – Seeing Music through Herman Leonard’s Photography will be the go-to book on the subject well into the future. My highest recommendation.

The Jazz Image – Seeing Music through Herman Leonard’s Photography, by K. Heather Pinson. 40 pages; appendices of exhibitions of Herman Leonard’s photography and publications. University Press of Mississippi, 2010, hardbound; ISBN 978-1-60473-494-2.

Music and Sentiment, by Charles Rosen

Is there a more thoughtful, probing, humane and literate performer writing on music today than the great pianist Charles Rosen? His The Classical Style, published in 1971, is a brilliant analysis/survey of the syntactical elements to be found in the masterworks of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Sonata Forms, published in 1980, is a kind of sequel, detailing the evolution of this archetypical structure, which nearly all the great masters have absorbed and modified in the composition of their sonatas, symphonies, string quartets, et al. 1995 saw the publication of The Romantic Generation, an exegesis on the musical languages of Chopin, Liszt, Schumann and Mendelssohn.

Rosen brings to bear his encyclopedic knowledge of music in many forms (opera, lieder, string chamber music) as well as, of course, his natural territory of piano masterworks, surveying the literature from Haydn to Debussy and Ravel – to the end of functional harmony, in other words, and the point in time where harmony morphs into tone color — the aim being to discover how musical grammar changed with the passage of time and style, from composer to composer, to create a sense of evolving, large scale unity. Rosen’s writing is replete with many musical examples, and reminds me of Donald Tovey’s essays on musical form and the masterworks of the classical era.

Music and Sentiment is a book for deeply engaged, well-read musicians who have a need to know the thought processes that went into creating the classical canon and beyond, and want to explore these mysteries from the vantage point of a first-class pianist well-versed in every style of music, from Bach to Alban Berg and beyond, to Pierre Boulez and Elliott Carter.

The theme is “sentiment” – perhaps best thought of in this case as thoughtful feeling allied to probing the contradictions, in both the poetic and syntactic sense, of how composers often wrote commentary into their music. Rosen has the great gift of elucidating how this happens, and his book is a model of the clarity and concision worthy of the classical music he so loves.

Chapters are: “Pre-Classical sentiment,” “The C minor style,” “Beethoven’s expansion,” “Romantic intensity” and “Obsessions” – this last is concerned with the crisis of tonality around 1900. Rosen lucidly describes the developing language of classical music as it goes beyond the boundaries of the classical style, with its expanding syntax and aesthetic and artistic achievements, via Brahms, into the 20^th century, in the music of Puccini, Strauss, Debussy, Ravel, Berg and Stravinsky.

This is a special book, written by a supremely gifted musician for the serious amateur music lover and professional alike to read, put down, re-read, study and return to months or years later. Worthy of an honored place on the musician’s bookshelf, it is a remarkable achievement. I believe it will be looked upon, over time, as a “classic.”

Music and Sentiment, by Charles Rosen. 146 pages. Yale University Press, 2010, hardbound; ISBN 978-0-300-12640-2.

– Steve Dankner

The ‘Ninth’- ­Beethoven and the World in 1824, by Harvey Sachs

If you’re a Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony aficionado (and most music lovers are,) and want to learn everything about the “Ninth,” I highly recommend the just-published book on this great masterwork: The ‘Ninth’- ­Beethoven and the World in 1824, by Harvey Sachs, published by Random House. In it, you’ll trace the development of the work from Beethoven’s earlier, experimental Choral Fantasy, op. 80, composed 16 years before the ‘Ninth,’ and learn about the reign of the repressive Bourbons, Hapsburgs and Romanovs who tried to quash middle and lower class uprisings (and wanted no part of Beethoven’s “Republican” sentiments, much less Schiller’s “Ode to Joy”) after the French Revolution.

Sachs, in the most engaging section of the book, transports the reader to the ‘Ninth’’s Vienna premiere, (which also included three ‘Hymns’ – movements from the Missa Solemnis) with descriptions based on eyewitness and performer accounts. For a sense of living history, it’s truly eye-opening, turning the recondite into a visible tempest: badly-copied music, a hot, crowded theatre, not enough rehearsal time, a bad performance with an overwhelmed chorus, and to top it off, the deaf, oblivious Beethoven on the podium, still conducting after the music had finished.

Books such as this, devoted to a single work, run the risk of becoming a book-length program note. That’s not the case here. Sachs, while admitting to not being a card-carrying musicologist, is a conductor and author of eight other books on subjects as diverse as Arturo Toscanini, Arthur Rubinstein, Placido Domingo and Georg Solti. Sachs brings other, equally important skills to the task of telling the backstory behind the planning, composition and premiere performance of the ‘Ninth’ – such as his thoroughgoing knowledge of early 19^th century European history, the cultural life of Vienna during that era, and the crosscurrents in poetry (Lord Byron,) the novel (Stendhal) and painting (Delacroix) – resulting in a highly readable and elucidating artistic comparison, and an outstanding literary companion to the ‘Ninth.’ Highly recommended.

The ‘Ninth’- ­Beethoven and the World in 1824, by Harvey Sachs, published by Random House, 2010; ISBN 978-1-4000-6077-1. Hardback.

Stradivari, by Stewart Pollens

String players have universally acknowledged Antonio Stradivari’s preeminence as “the greatest violin maker who ever lived,” according to the author of this comprehensive tome on the Master. This is a book that will appeal, obviously, to string players, and also to guitarists, lutenists, mandolinists, lovers of early music (both listeners and performers) – even harpists (who knew that Stradivari made a single documented harp)?

Archives, churches and the Museo Stradivariano in Cremona, Italy possess Stradivari’s instrument patterns, many of which are illustrated in the book. Baroque stringing and tuning practices and tables of measurements for both the standard violins, violas and cellos crafted at his workshop, as well as non-standard, transitional stringed instruments that never caught on and/or are lost are documented. Stradivari is amply filled with hundreds of black and white photographs of the Master’s instruments, mostly depicted in parts: scrolls, necks and body patterns, et al.  A full-color section of some of the rarest violins and cellos with lavish decoration adds to the sense of awe one feels at the genius and artistry of the long-lived Stradivari (1644? -1737,) who made these masterpieces for over 60 years, and who created over 1100 instruments in all, of which about 650 are extant.

Lavishly printed, this is a 300-page, coffee table sized volume. Stradivari will certainly be of interest to any individual or music library with a collection in the areas of music history and research, iconography and instrument construction, and performance practice. The book is a pleasure to read, either in whole or in part – as either a detective story of sorts (Stradivari’s lost varnish formulae, for example) or as a reference work to be consulted by stringed instrument makers and restorers.

Author Stewart Pollens was Conservator of Musical Instruments at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for 30 years. Highly recommended.

Stradivari, by Stewart Pollens, published by Cambridge University Press, 2010; ISBN 978-0-521-87304-8. Hardback.

Intimate Voices – the Twentieth Century String Quartet, Vols. I and II (Volume I: Debussy to Villa Lobos; Volume II: Shostakovich to the Avant-Garde), edited by Evan Jones

Quoting editor Evan Jones, “… twentieth century composers… have chosen the string quartet for their most substantial and seriously conceived statements.” It is certainly true that the string quartet, along with the symphony, these most ‘classical’ of genres, has survived the turbulence and stylistic dislocation of the last century.  However…

These volumes make visible in printed form, at least, the quartets of composers who, with a few exceptions, seldom make it to the concert hall.  Occasionally, one encounters a Prokofiev or Hindemith quartet (likely the Third,) or the Shostakovich Eighth Quartet in concert. What about the quartets of Ligeti, Berio, Cage, Babbitt, Mel Powell and Shulamit Ran?

These two volumes are in the form of 20 chapters – mostly written by music theorists, and are clearly intended for other theorists/academicians who possess the ability and interest to plow through page after page of dry analytical verbiage and graphs: both latter-day Schenkerian and quasi-mathematical.

The volumes, though handsomely produced, utilize a too-small font size that has a grey-ish cast, making the text very hard to read.

This literature, in my opinion, would benefit from trade book treatment for the general reader, perhaps accompanied by a sample compact disc of the music – something that can be understood by the serious music lover, so that these works might appear on listeners’ and performers’ radar. Then, if they were to be performed in concert with some frequency, everybody would be happy, including, I presume, the theorists.

Intimate Voices – the Twentieth Century String Quartet, Vols. I and II;

Volume I: Debussy to Villa Lobos; Volume II: Shostakovich to the Avant-Garde, Edited by Evan Jones. University of Rochester Press, 2009. ISBN 13: 978-1-58046-229-7

– Steve Dankner