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Rough Ideas And The Little Bach Book

By on August 17, 2020 in Books, Reviews

Rough Ideas–Reflections On Music And More; Stephen Hough (Farar, Straus and Giroux; 2020) The Little Bach Book; David Gordon (Lucky Valley Press; 2017) However one manages life in a pandemic, I suggest that the disruption of former routines and the disorienting effects of ongoing uncertainty can be at least partially ameliorated by the transporting power […]

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Book Review: Furtwängler’s Writings–The Intellectual Biography of a Second-Rater

By on July 7, 2018 in Books, Features, Reviews

Roger Allen. Wilhelm Furtwängler: Art and the Politics of the Unpolitical. The Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 2018 (286pp). Just how smart was Wilhelm Furtwängler? That he was musically gifted there can be no question, but there is a significant difference between being talented and being intelligent. Similarly, one can be very highly educated—as a function of […]

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A Remarkable New Toscanini Biography

By on October 2, 2017 in Books

Harvey Sachs: Toscanini, Musician of Conscience (Liveright Publishing Corporation [W.W. Norton], 2017). Arturo Toscanini was a simple man at heart. He had three great passions: conducting, screwing, and complaining. Some readers will be most interested in the first of these, some, I suppose, the second, and none the third. Harvey Sachs, in this wholesale rewrite […]

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GUSTAV MAHLER: A NEW LIFE CUT SHORT

By on April 8, 2008 in Books, Reviews

Henry Louis de la Grange (Oxford) April, 2008 Henry-Louis de la Grange’s fourth and final volume in his epic Mahler biography takes a firm, even polemical position on the composer’s American years, and this gives the writing an urgency and thrust that sets it apart from the previous three volumes (a revised and enlarged Volume […]

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CRAFT ON CRAFT: A TIMELY MEMOIR OF A REMARKABLE ARTIST

By on October 23, 2002 in Books, Reviews

An Improbable Life: Memoirs by Robert Craft (Vanderbilt University Press) It’s about time that Robert Craft spent some time explaining how he came to be Robert Craft. The importance of what he did during his 30+ years working with Stravinsky, assisting in the genesis and birth of the masterpieces of the great composer’s final decades, […]

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Christoph Wolff: Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician

By on October 9, 2001 in Books, Reviews

W.W. Norton and Co. (599 pages; Hardcover) Harvard professor and eminent Bach scholar Christoph Wolff’s new book Bach: The Learned Musician belongs in the library of anyone who enjoys reading musical biography. His compendious knowledge, not just of his subject, but also of Bach’s political, artistic, intellectual, and geographical environment allows him to demystify and […]

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