NEW PICKS: Choices of New Classical CDs, DVDs, Books
Friday, 21 April 2006
Topic: BOOK choices Irving Fine (1914-1962) may have been the most gifted American composer of his generation. He was born in Boston, brought up in Winthrop, educated at Harvard and at Tanglewood; he was one of the founding fathers of the music program at Brandeis University, which to this day sponsors an annual concert in his memory. ...LINK to complete story | Consumer Information
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Updated: Saturday, 22 April 2006 1:02 AM EDT
Sunday, 12 February 2006
Topic: BOOK choices
The Steinway Collection: Paintings of Great Composers
James Gibbons Huneker
Music lovers will delight in the beautiful color paintings and eloquent prose portraits in The Steinway Collection: Paintings of Great Composers. Chopin, Wagner, Liszt, Beethoven, Berlioz, Mozart, Verdi, Mendelssohn, Handel, and Schubert are among the composers celebrated in this historic book, which was originally printed in 1919 as an in-house publication of Steinway & Sons and has never before been released to the public.
The Steinway Collection: Paintings of Great Composers By James Gibbons Huneker / 1-57467-115-4, hardcover, US$22.00, C$32.95
(Pricing and availability subject to change)
Classical music isn’t what it used to be. Great composers and performers once were seen as giants — larger-than-life beings who deserved to be immortalized, plaster busts on pedestals. ...LINK to complete story
The first decades of the twentieth century were a fertile and fascinating period in American musical history. This book and the two CDs that accompany it present an exceptional collection of interviews with and about the most significant musical figures of the era. Tapping the unparalleled materials contained in the Oral History American Music archive at Yale University, Composers' Voices from Ives to Ellington is a unique account of what it was like for musicians and composers to live and work in those years. It is also the story of the making of this archive, as told by Vivian Perlis, who personally conducted many of the interviews.
Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music Topic: BOOK choices
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Written by a venerable classical music performer who has played with the New York Philharmonic, the New York City Ballet, and in numerous Broadway musicals including Wicked!, Miss Saigon, Les Miserables, and Aspects of Love, Mozart in the Jungle is the personal story of a lifelong fascination with classical music beginning when the author is seven years old and, inspired by a performance of The Magic Flute, decides she wants to perform on stage. Playing the oboe, she quickly gains admittance to a prestigious school of the arts in North Carolina and at the age of 16 has already distinguished herself by selling pot to fellow violinists and screwing her 43 year old flute teacher for a grade. From there it's off to New York, and a series of escapades with married musicians, conductors, and a passionate affair with professional pianist and lifelong accompanist to Itzhak Perlman, Sam Sanders. Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music
The prim and proper world of classical music has a seamy and steamy side, fully detailed in a new book by Blair Tindall.
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Updated: Monday, 4 July 2005 12:51 AM EDT
FROM THE CRITICS...
Publishers Weekly
Like contrapuntal voices in a Bach fugue, the lives of an aging composer and a young dictator are intertwined and interlocked in this absorbing cultural history. Gaines (The Lives of the Piano), former managing editor of Time, Life and People magazines, begins by recounting Frederick's abrupt summons of Bach to his court at Potsdam. Here, in an apparent effort to humiliate the old-style composer, Frederick, enamored of the new in philosophy and art, sets Bach a succession of seemingly impossible musical challenges: to each, the composer responds with unthinkable genius, culminating in his Musical Offering. But beneath the biographical counterpoint traced by Gaines is a longer, unfinished duel between two visions of humankind-one that the sensitive and musically inclined Frederick was also fighting within himself. He had been brutally abused by his father and was increasingly committed to the cynical pursuit of military expansion; the sun gradually sets on the Prussian king, who is consumed by disillusionment, inflicting pain on himself and countless others. As night falls on the (un)enlightened despot, Bach's star begins to rise, and later, he will acquire the veneration his genius merits, his music a perennial reminder that "the light of reason can blind us to a deeper kind of illumination." Illus. not seen by PW. Agent, Liz Darhansoff. (Mar. 4) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information. Barnes and Noble Associate: LibraryPreviews.com
Balanchine's life story is a fascinating journey -- from his near-accidental enrollment, at the age of nine, in St. Petersburg's Imperial School of Ballet, through the deprivation and hunger of Bolshevik Russia, to Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, and finally, in 1933, to the United States and eventually to the New York City Ballet, to which his reputation is forever tied.
The author, a musicologist at the University of California at Berkeley, is known in scholarly circles as a specialist in early music and Russian composers of the 19th and 20th centuries.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Blessed with one of the most beautiful voices of her generation, soprano Ren?eFleming is one of the most celebrated talents on today's music scene. In The Inner Voice, this great singer shares what she has learned from her experience as an inspiration for those contemplating a career in the arts. From struggling to get a career under way to dealing with her own personal doubts, Fleming is wonderfully candid and articulate about her art--especially the little discussed heart-throat-mind connection--and childhood influences, formal education, mentors, preparation, and mental and physical discipline.
Irving Fine (1914-1962) may have been the most gifted American composer of his generation. He was born in Boston, brought up in Winthrop, educated at Harvard and at Tanglewood; he was one of the founding fathers of the music program at Brandeis University, which to this day sponsors an annual concert in his memory.
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