A first-rate biographical study of one of the century's more important conductors, Dimitri Mitropoulos (18961960). Based on the research of late musicologist Oliver Daniel, music critic Trotter has created a comprehensive and neatly written portrait of Mitropoulos, whom he correctly calls the ``Forgotten Giant.'' Tracing his life from student days in Greece to his mature artistic career spent primarily in America (a decade in Minneapolis, where he created an ensemble competitive with the top US orchestras, followed in the 1950s by the music directorship of the New York Philharmonic), Trotter emphasizes that Mitropoulos approached music-making with the self-denying religious fervor that almost had led him as a young man to take a monk's vows. This otherworldly attitude may explain the genuinely tragic circumstances of Mitropoulos's later years: his relative lack of pretense about his own homosexuality at a time when other gay conductors advanced their careers (sometimes at Mitropoulos's expense) by remaining in the closet; his remaining in America instead of returning to Europe, where he was idolized, on the grounds that he could fulfill his missionary service to serious music better in the New World; his carelessness about his health, which led to his premature death of a massive coronary while rehearsing the La Scala Philharmonic in Mahler's Third Symphony. None of this is simple, and with the notable exception of Trotter's overemphasis on the effects of Howard Taubman's New York Times criticismreminiscent of the ``critics killed John Keats'' school of biographyhe avoids many of the potholes of oversimplification. Since Mitropoulos is an elusive conductor on disc, good hints toward a basic discography are included. Humanizing, a valuable panorama of US classical music culture, and an irresistible inducement to seek out the Mitropoulos performances left to us on records. (66 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-931340-81-0
Page Count: 532
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
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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