Concerto Conversations (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures) - Hardcover

Kerman, Joseph

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674158911 ISBN 13: 9780674158917

Publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 1999

Synopsis

The concerto has attracted relatively little attention as a genre, Joseph Kerman observes, and his urbane and wide-ranging Norton Lectures fill the gap in a way that will delight all music listeners. Kerman addresses the full range of the concerto repertory, treating both the general and the particular. His perceptive commentary on individual works--with illustrative performances on the accompanying CD--is alive with enthusiasm, intimations, and insights into the spirit of concerto.

Concertos model human relationships, according to Kerman, and his description of the conversation between solo instrument and orchestra brings this observation vividly to life. What does the solo instrument do when it first enters in a concerto? How do composers balance claims of solo-orchestra contrast and solo virtuosity? When do they deploy the sumptuous musical textures that only concertos can provide? Kerman's unexpected answers offer a new understanding of the concerto and a stimulus to enhanced listening.

In language that the Boston Globe's Richard Dyer calls "always delightfully vivid," Kerman conducts readers and listeners into the conversations that concertos so eloquently enact. Amid the musical forces at play, he renews the dialogue of music lovers with the language of the concerto--the familiar, the lesser-known, the cherished, and the undervalued. The CD packaged with the book contains movements from works that Kerman treats most intensively--by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Bartók, Stravinsky, and Prokofiev.

About this title

About the Author

Joseph Kerman is Professor of Music, Emeritus, at the University of California, Berkeley. He was the Charles Eliot Norton Lecturer at Harvard University for 1997–98.

Reviews

What a pity this engaging, intelligent book is not a multimedia CD or video series (one of the publication formats of Leonard Bernstein's Norton lectures). Kerman (Write All These Down: Essays on Music) knows that successful music appreciation sessions need "less talk and more music." His lectures provided more music than is found on the accompanying CD (and unlike the CD, they included video clips as well). The book does have photographs and musical examples, but they're crowded at the back. Cues to CD tracks or notated examples appear in the text, but readers must flip pages and hit CD player pause buttons to follow Kerman's ideasAwhich move from concerto beginnings and endings to the reciprocal interplay of soloists and orchestra ("conversations") to treatment of all this and more by various composers. With added text (to compensate for the missing music), this book would have found readers among musical connoisseurs who appreciate Kerman's imaginative skill in making connections and his unique combination of erudition and accessibility. For large libraries that can handle books with CDs.ABonnie Jo Dopp, Univ. of Maryland Lib., College Park
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674158911
• ISBN 13: 9780674158917
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 192