Ralph Vaughan Williams: An Essential Guide to His Life and Works: Classic FM Lifelines

Written with enthusiasm and accessible prose , the Classic fM Lifelines series will become the Everyman o f musical biographies. Titles for the series have been chose n from the Classic fM''s own listener surveys of most popular composers. '

These six books, part of a 12-title series published in Great Britain, all carry a small portrait of the composer on the cover and the tag line "an essential guide to his life and works." They are all the same length, with six to ten chapters, and offer a complete list of works and of recommended readings and recordings. These six are by different authors, but most of the authors have written other titles in the series, and they have all written about music elsewhere. The composers featured were selected on the basis of popularity with British radio listeners (which makes the exclusion of Mozart surprising). As such, the authors presume that readers possess a love of and familiarity with standard repertoire. Containing no musical examples, the books are more biography than musical analysis and serve as good, lively introductions to the composers. Though they are slim paperbacks on nonpermanent paper, their sturdy bindings should hold together through many circulations. Recommended for small and medium-sized libraries.?Bonnie Jo Dopp, Univ. of Maryland Lib., College Park
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.