A work that general readers will enjoy and the musical cognoscenti will devour.
The edited texts of six engaging conversations about music between the celebrated Japanese writer and the noted conductor who led the Boston Symphony Orchestra for nearly 30 years.
Although Murakami (The Strange Library, 2014, etc.) identifies himself as an “amateur,” we learn throughout these discussions that he has been a longtime collector of classical recordings, a longtime listener, and a habitual member of audiences at classical concerts and operas. His knowledge of music is beyond impressive, as anyone who has read his novels already knows. He loves jazz, and one of the most interesting passages involves exchanges about blues in Chicago in the 1960s. Ozawa also declares a deep admiration for Louis Armstrong. Each conversation focuses on a certain aspect of Ozawa’s career, and the flow is generally chronological. We learn about his early experiences with Leonard Bernstein, and throughout, the conductor praises his early mentor, Hideo Saito; a later exchange deals comprehensively with the group Ozawa helped establish in his honor, the Saito Kinen Orchestra. Ozawa is quick to praise—individual musicians, older conductors, composers, orchestras (Cleveland gets a couple of nice nods)—and hardly says a discouraging word about anyone or anything, save his early experience conducting Tosca in Milan when he was startled to hear booing. (It disappeared as his engagement went along, however.) Although Murakami occasionally notes similarities and/or differences between the lives of a conductor and a writer—he mentions that both he and Ozawa begin working before dawn—the focus is almost entirely on music and on Ozawa’s career. We learn a lot about his work habits—for example, his fierce study of scores in preparation for performances—and his techniques for handling the immense demands on his time. He also states a deep conviction that the conductor’s task is to “convert the music exactly as it’s written into actual sound.”
A work that general readers will enjoy and the musical cognoscenti will devour.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-35434-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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