Our critics cast their eyes over this month’s selection of books on classical music
Giving It Away – Classical Music in Lockdown and
Other Fairytales
Paul Carey Jones
Self-published 216pp (pb) £7.99
Back in March 2020 – which feels centuries ago now – bassbaritone Paul Carey Jones visited London with his girlfriend for a birthday trip to the theatre. He was preparing to return to Cardiff when new quarantine guidelines and lockdown rules prevented him from doing so. Shortly afterwards, he lost every single one of his singing contracts, which were either cancelled or indefinitely postponed.
He began to record his thoughts on the developing pandemic crisis and its impact on the world of classical music from the perspective of a UK opera singer in a blog called Coronaclassical, which attracted wide attention. Sections of the blog are reproduced here in book form.
His view is alert and complex, evaluating developments with a searching but sceptical eye. There’s no shortage of good ideas in his approach to a problem that has found operatic managements the world over wrong-footed, literally giving away the valuable assets of their recorded performances.
A steadily rising Wotan, he explores Wagner’s most complex character in further essays which also cover Tosca’s death and other matters largely vocal and all worth encountering. George Hall ★★★★
The Joy of Playing, the Joy of Thinking – Conversations About Art and Performance Charles Rosen
& Catherine Temerson
Harvard University Press 160pp (hb)
‘A multiplicity of points of view has become central to the artistic imagination of the 20th century,’ writes Israel Rosenfield in the foreword to The Joy of Playing, the Joy of Thinking, a collection of historic conversations between pianist Charles Rosen and his friend £20
Catherine Temerson. Rosenfield’s observation is at odds with today’s ‘no platforming’ cancel culture: it is risky to republish decadesold transcriptions (the book first appeared in French in 1993 and is translated here by Catherine Zerner). Although some of Rosen’s (1927-2012) opinions are likely to engender debate, his insistence that performance should integrate artistic context, aesthetics and score analysis now seems perfectly sensible. Rosen shares absorbing anecdotes relating to his studies with Moriz Rosenthal, who had been a student of Liszt, and the time that he inadvertently offended Stravinsky by asking about an assumed printer’s error in a score. As ‘a conversation between two good friends intended for an audience of interested non-professionals’ it is just the thing for those missing the camaraderie of post-concert chat. Claire Jackson ★★★★
Music in World War II – Coping with Wartime in Europe and the United States Ed. Pamela M. Potter et al University of Indiana 318pp (pb) £24.99 This fascinating collection of essays charts musical activity during World War Two through a surprisingly varied range of topics and mediums. Activities in the concert hall and on the operatic stage focus on the remarkable seasons of darkened concerts (Dunkelkonzerte) given by the Vienna Symphony between 1939 and 1944 and the intractable issues that faced the programme planners in mounting German and Italian repertoire at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York during the same period. Just as interesting, however, are chapters that deal with contrasting notions of musical diplomacy in the soundtracks to American and Soviet films of the 1940s, the wartime propaganda that percolated into Broadway shows and the extraordinary buoyancy of Czech swing and popular music during the Nazi occupation. Inevitably some of the featured material, which includes the exploration of music-making in America’s German POW camps or the popular programmes devised by organist Sandy Macpherson at the BBC, is targeted to a more specialist audience. But the quality of writing and the strong engagement of all the contributing authors shines through almost every page. Erik Levi ★★★★
The New Beethoven
Ed. Jeremy Yudkin
Boydell Press 572pp (hb) £95
One of the problems with iconic status is that critical acumen can easily transmute into intellectualised reverence. The stoic features of Thomas Crawford’s 1856 statue, which adorn this mighty tome, captures the Beethovenian myth at its apex: the squarejawed features, the lion’s mane of hair, the impregnable stare of heroism. One could even argue that the publication of a formidable collection of essays as part of the 250th-birthday year celebrations perpetuates (unintentionally) the Romantic archetype.
Yet far from offering a platitudinous overview, fresh insights abound, ranging from the previously under-acknowledged impact of Pierre-alexandre Monsigny’s opéras-comiques on Beethoven’s burgeoning style and the musical instruments he owned, to a set of parts of the Op. 135 String Quartet, copied in the composer’s own hand, that reveal several fundamental rethinks when compared with the original autograph. One might easily have imagined that there was little left to say about Beethoven that had not been said a hundred times before – this bracingly wide-ranging compendium proves otherwise. Julian Haylock ★★★★★