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MONUMENTAL: INDISPENSABLE: NEW: First Edition hardcover (orig. April 1999) 2nd printing, NEW handsomely-designed unclipped mylar-protected jacket w/ sharp NEW edges & corners & showing orig. $35.00 pub. price at top-right front flyleaf, NEW cover w/ sea-blue paper wrapping spine & extending 2.88" onto front & back panels covered in light-gray rag paper & w/ EXCELLENT edges & corners & titles handsomely silver-stamped on spine, IMMACULATE smooth-cut text-block exterior, IMPECCABLE lemon-cream card-stock end-papers, NEW sewn binding w/ tight signatures, PRISTINE interior printed w/ handsome clarity in ITC Legacy Serif Book on EXCELLENT unblemished acid-free paper * Preface (7), Introduction (19), Chronology (407), Selected Bibliography (419), Contributors (423), Index (429) * 6.36" x 9.50" x 1.62", 0.86 kg, 448 pp. * The 1997 centennial of Brahms' death has intensified interest among concert-goers & music lovers in the composer's prodigious body of work. For all those eager to delve more deeply into Brahms' music, "The Compleat Brahms" is an indispensable companion. In a single volume that covers every work written by Brahms, leading scholars from across the country provide details of each work's composition & discuss its important stylistic features. Interspersed are fascinating essays -(such as "Brahms, Joachim, and the Schumanns")- that bring the composer & his contemporaries to life. Much more than a collection of program notes, "The Compleat Brahms" vividly portrays the work & world of one of the giants of Western music history. * CRITICAL PRAISE: Monumental is the first word that occurs to you when you begin exploring what has been put together by Leon Botstein & his 29 collaborators, & it's appropriate. Seen from a distance -(& how else can we see him more than a century after his death?)- there is also something monumental -(almost forbidding)- about the figure of Brahms himself. He was the great musical conservative in the creative ferment of the late 19th century. Haunted by the figure of Beethoven, he destroyed much of his own work -(carefully tailoring his posthumous image)- in fear of negative comparisons. At the same time, he preserved almost single-handedly the great classical tradition embodied in Beethoven's work, particularly the tradition of the symphony & other abstract works using sonata form, which was nearly engulfed in Brahms' lifetime by Lisztian tone poems, Wagnerian "music of the future," the rise of musical nationalism, & even the first stirrings of impressionism. In this context, Brahms becomes a lonely figure but a vital one. Virtually every piece composed by Brahms & not sacrificed to his uncompromising critical standards is discussed in this compendium, lucidly, readably, in biographical & cultural context, & in fine detail. The writers are all scholars or professional performers -(often both)- but they have worked hard to make their discussions & analyses accessible to the interested general reader, & in their diversity of approaches they have made the book a compendium of the varied techniques for writing readably about music. You may not agree with every word -(a fine seasoning of opinion has been allowed to flavor the masses of fact)- & it is not the sort of book that anyone but a fanatic will gallop through from cover to cover, BUT you will find Brahms here in all his complexity, still monumental but more approachable than ever. -Joe McLellan.
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