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 “Bauza’s instrument was out of date before it was completed,” writes the author, technologically more primitive than pianos constructed by the respected company Pleyel, in Paris, Chopin’s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
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
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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