A deeply researched, gracefully told music history.
The destiny of one piano reveals changing attitudes about romantic music.
Composer, pianist, and music historian Kildea (Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century, 2013, etc.), former artistic director of London’s Wigmore Hall, crafts an engrossing narrative focused on a singular piano on which, in 1838, Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849) composed 24 astonishing preludes. Living in Majorca with his lover, George Sand, Chopin found a piano made from local woods by artisan Juan Bauza. “Bauza’s instrument was out of date before it was completed,” writes the author, technologically more primitive than pianos constructed by the respected company Pleyel, in Paris, Chopin’s subsequent instrument of choice. The Bauza piano, Kildea asserts, contributed significantly to the unconventional sound of the Preludes, which garnered little attention when they were published in 1839. Robert Schumann was among the few who noticed, writing a “perplexed though ultimately admiring” review, calling them “ruins, eagle wings, a wild motley of pieces,” poetic, passionate, yet also containing “the morbid, the feverish, the repellent.” Chopin performed selections at private gatherings, eliciting similarly puzzled responses. Kildea offers a close technical and formal analysis of the pieces, concluding that “Chopin really did invent a new genre,” constructing patchworks “from the most brilliant but unexpected juxtapositions.” Suffering from stage fright, Chopin reluctantly gave public concerts; with the Bauza piano left behind in Majorca, he preferred “the soft attack, the hazy harmonics, the fine gradations between dynamics,” and the varying tones in different registers of the Pleyel instruments. Kildea also examines the evolution of piano construction in the 1830s and ’40s, “a Wild West” of experimentation and innovation. By the late 19th century, powerful new pianos, such as those made by the American firm Steinway, proved irresistible to pianists aiming for drama rather than the “thoughtful, intimate communications between composer, performer, and listener initiated by Chopin.” As the author chronicles many pianists’ interpretations of Chopin, Wanda Landowska emerges as an important champion. Besides performing and writing about Chopin’s works, she acquired the Bauza piano, whose later provenance Kildea carefully traces.
A deeply researched, gracefully told music history.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-65222-2
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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