News & Reviews

Some of the most recognizable (and beautiful) melodies of twentieth century classical music were penned by Sergei Rachmaninoff. Rachmaninoff and His World, the most recent release from the Bard Music Festival, examines the place of this Romantic composer in the pantheon of his contemporaries.

Music and food are two of life’s greatest pleasures. Pierpaolo Polzonetti offers an explanation of their relationship in his newest book, Feasting and Fasting in Opera. He traces the evolution of opera and eating (or not) from performances during Renaissance banquets through the works of Verdi and Puccini.

In the introduction to The Beloved Vision: A History of Nineteenth Century Music, author Stephen Walsh refers to the book as a “conspectus of how [Romanticism] all came about, why it took the form it did, and indeed what it actually amounts to.” To truly understand the development and societal impact of Romanticism in the nineteenth century, Walsh claims, we must focus on the historical background of the movement.

Dr. Rebecca Cypess specializes in the history of women and Judaism in classical music. As a harpsichordist and scholar, she has written extensively on Salon culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and recorded albums with the Raritan Players, most recently “In the Salon of Madame Brillon: Music and Friendship in Benjamin Franklin’s Paris.” Her new book, Women and Musical Salons in the Enlightenment, explores the overlooked role of the Salon and the women who hosted them in the second half of the eighteenth century.

Laura Tunbridge’s Beethoven: A Life In Nine Pieces, is a well-regarded biography of Ludwig van Beethoven–and for good reason. Each of the nine chapters explores a particular piece composed by Beethoven, from less popular compositions like the Septet, Op. 20 to long-lasting masterpieces such as the Ninth Symphony. Tunbridge explores the idea that Beethoven’s life can be analyzed through the study of his compositions.

Haruki Murakami is the famous Japanese author of worldwide bestsellers such as Kafka on the Shore and 1Q84. Classical music is a favorite of his, and it comes up so often in his books that his website includes playlists containing the music mentioned in each.

With red blood flooding the streets of Leningrad, Shostakovich’s story begins. Not literally, of course–Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich was born in 1906, while the Russian Revolution led by Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin began in 1917. But the Revolution is, perhaps, when his musical story began its first chapter.

There are many legends about the great violin virtuoso. One of the most familiar is, of course, that Paganini must have been in league with the devil in order to have developed such remarkable skill with his instrument.

Western classical music has a long and fascinating history, which Nicholas Kenyon illuminates in several ways. Each chapter has a topical title such as “Chant” or “Masters,” and they proceed sequentially in time from early (35,000 years ago in a German cave) to late (Hamilton on Broadway). Kenyon is an expert on early music, having edited a book about it and as a member of the editorial board of the journal Early Music. Beginning with some of the first notated music of classical Greece, he takes us on a detailed journey through the gorgeous and increasingly complex world of medieval and Renaissance music. Along the way, we are always made aware of the influence these composers and their music have on each other.

Sometimes, through the expanse of time, classical music can appear like a placid ocean. But underneath there is always tremendous activity. Stephen Johnson, in his book The Eighth: Mahler and the World in 1910, shows us how active things were with Gustav Mahler while composing and conducting his titanic choral Eighth Symphony.

Will  our fascination with Johann Sebastian Bach ever cease? After reading The Way of Bach by Dan Moller, the answer would have to be an emphatic “no.”

You may know Stephen Hough as a concert pianist, but you probably don’t know that he is a painter and prize-winning poet. This Renaissance man is the first classical musician to have received a MacArthur Genius Grant. Mr. Hough’s newest book, Rough Ideas, is a collection of short essays, or as I might call them, “thought pieces.” They are the result of notes about a wide range of topics that he jotted down while he was waiting—at airports, on planes, and in hotel rooms. After reading one of these essays and reflecting on it, I often felt that I had been engaged in a conversation with a warm, witty, and intelligent friend. Photo: Andrew Crowley

Author David Wyn Jones has turned in a remarkable work of music history in his book Music in Vienna: 1700, 1800, 1900. Vienna, of course, is famous for having been a great center of classical music for centuries. Wyn offers a biography of this crucial city by offering snapshots of the musical life at the turn of three centuries.

English professor Matthew Lau has written a book on the uses of classical music in modernist cinema. With Sounds Like Helicopters we have a fascinating academic treatise on how classical music adds layers of meaning upon many of the most important films of the twentieth century.

Historical graphic novels can be evocative conduits to the past. Comic artist and writer Frantz Duchazeau gives us just this with his wonderful graphic novel Mozart in Paris. Translated to English in 2019, Mozart in Paris tells the story of the six months Mozart spent in the French capital with his mother when he was twenty-two.