Our critics cast their eyes over this month’s selection of books on classical music
Conversations
Steve Reich
Hanover Square 352pp (hb) £20.87 Inspired by Stravinsky’s published discussions with conductor Robert Craft, in Conversations Steve Reich preserves his shared reflections with collaborators past and present. Michael Tilson Thomas describes the 1973 performance of Four Organs
– in which the Carnegie Hall audience was so unruly the conductor had to shout out bar numbers (‘When we came off stage and you were white as a sheet, I said to you, nothing like this has happened since The Rite of Spring’)
– while Colin Currie talks about preparing Drumming for the 2006 Prom to mark Reich’s 70th birthday. Doing away with the usual thirdparty interviewer has its perks: conversation is natural, personal and, because it is a composer talking to fellow artists, elicits interesting analysis (the impact of Reich being left-handed, or how a violin can double a train whistle, as in Different Trains). Most of the conversations took place over Zoom in 2020 (an exception is the 2015 in-person chat with Stephen Sondheim). Unfortunately, each chapter is unimaginatively presented as a straight transcription, which eventually becomes as tedious as a video call itself. Claire Jackson ★★★
Fred and the Fantastic Tub-tub Zeb Soanes;
Anja Uhren (illustrations)
Graffeg 48pp (hb) £12.99
Originally devised by composer James Marangone as a narrated concert for the Orpheus Sinfonia, Fred and the Fantastic Tub-tub is a children’s story with an ambitious vision. At its heart is a crucial environmental message, but along the way it shares the wonders of botany, flying machines and – of course – the universal language of music. Fred is whisked off to the fictitious island of ‘Papa Nupi’ by her plant-loving grandpa, who
longs to hear the ‘music’ of the rare Tub-tub plant. The island, however, has become the final resting place for much of the world’s plastic, casting the future of the musical plant in doubt. Fred, Grandpa and the islanders hear its sweet melody, which Fred records and shares online. Before long the world hears it too and works together to stop the pollution. The green message is sweetly optimistic, the music message oft-peddled, but it’s beautifully told by Zeb Soanes, and Anja Uhren’s illustrations are a delight. The book includes a QR code so that readers can hear Marangone’s music, plus tips on how to re-use plastic bottles for planting. Michael Beek ★★★★
Kurt Weill’s America Naomi Graber
Oxford University Press
320pp (hb) £22.99
This absorbing book seeks to dispel the myth that there is a
dichotomy between Kurt Weill’s career as a provocative modernist composer of the Weimar Republic and his later achievements from 1935 onwards as a refugee in the United States, where he carved out a formidable and commercially successful reputation, especially on Broadway. Naomi Graber asserts that the connecting link between these two phases of his life lies in his remarkably fluid concept of America which is manifested in famous works such as the opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny or the ballet The Seven Deadly Sins.
Although Graber probes the Americanisms of his Weimar Republic output in some detail, her main focus here is to chart various different preoccupations (for example, social engagement, American folklore and Jewish heritage) of his later period. Thanks to her painstakingly detailed research, the picture that emerges of the composer is far richer and more influential than I had previously imagined, not least with regard to the significant impact of his work on later composers such as Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim. Erik Levi ★★★★
Ten Masterpieces of Music Harvey Sachs
Liveright 336pp (hb) £23.99
The clue to the contents of this richly enjoyable book is in the title. It is not ‘The Ten Masterpieces of Music’, but a selection of great works that allow Harvey Sachs to expand and enrich our knowledge and experience of the classical tradition from the 1780s through to the 1960s.
As Sachs points out, his choice was shaped by each work’s propensity for forming a vital part of a sweeping narrative. Pointing out the similarities and differences between Mozart’s and Beethoven’s musical worlds, for example, is made all the more poignant by focusing analytically on the former’s K453 Piano Concerto and the latter’s ‘Archduke’ Piano Trio.
Sachs then traces the Romantic mainstream via five archetypal masterworks, bookended by two pieces of chamber music: Schubert’s D887 String Quartet, and the Op. 111 String Quintet by a composer who played a vital role in rescuing Schubert’s music from oblivion – Brahms. In between comes a song cycle: Schumann’s Dichterliebe, a generic hybrid; Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust; and an operatic blockbuster, Verdi’s Don Carlos.
Encapsulating the first half
(or so) of 20th-century music via Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony, Prokofiev’s Eighth Piano Sonata and Stravinsky’s Requiem Canticles, may seem a tall order, yet such is Sachs’s inspired use of language and syntax that in context the sequence feels logical and almost inevitable. Julian Haylock ★★★★