Concerto Conversations: With a 68-minute CD (Charles Eliot Norton Lectures)
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Concerto Conversations: With a 68-minute CD (Charles Eliot Norton Lectures) Details
Amazon.com Review For more than 40 years, since his seminal book Opera as Drama, Joseph Kerman has been among the most perceptive and lucid commentators on music. Readers new to his work will find a highly personable companion in Concerto Conversations, while those who already know it can appreciate a late-period distillation of his methods. In typical fashion, Kerman begins not with a preface of introduction but with a chapter on beginnings. There is a general division of the dynamic between soloist and orchestra into the concepts of "reciprocity" versus "polarity," but the book is really more a collection of highly individual observations about specific concertos. Kerman touches on some works lightly and deftly while giving others a fuller treatment. Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto, Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto (Kerman, blessedly, takes Tchaikovsky very seriously), Stravinsky's Concerto for Piano and Winds, and Mozart's D Minor Piano Concerto get the widest overviews. We find Kerman's love of language throughout: "High noon! One can almost see solo and orchestra glaring at each other" in the Beethoven; the strings in the Tchaikovsky are "sisterly, and secular." Kerman tosses off provocative ideas along the way: the concerto has already postdated the symphony, the great contrapuntist Bach used a fugal introduction to a concerto only once, and particular events in the life of Liszt affected his piano concertos. Kerman makes an important point in contrasting virtuosity with bravura. These elegant, concise lectures were first conceived for the Norton series at Harvard. A 12-track, 69-minute CD of musical examples (along with extensive musical quotations in an appendix) is included. --William R. Braun Read more From Library Journal 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. Read more Review Concerto Conversations is valuable, even crucial, for its unprepossessing manner, its casual movement from one example to the next, its elegance and literateness and lucidity. No Schenker graphs here, no narratology or gender studies. The concerto is revealed not as a construction of bourgeois identity, nor as a zone of suppressed homoeroticism, but instead as a human, emotional realm in which solo and orchestral characters are engaged in various forms of conversation and conflict. Kerman manages to be both intelligent and intelligible. He writes for the bright layman, as academicians did once upon a time. His evocations of particular musical moments are immediate and magical. His gift is so uncommon as to make one sad. (Alex Ross New Republic)Concerto Conversations is a satisfying exploration of how the wide range of composers have handled the balance and contrast between soloist and orchestra in a classical concerto. Based on his series of Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, these are not for the musical novice, but they are surprisingly accessible for probably any regular symphony-goer. (Theodore P. Mahne New Orleans Times)Splendid, entertaining, original, and often profound...Kerman speaks directly and informally to a literate and educated public deeply interested in music...His affable manner sometimes makes his approach to the subject seem obvious, the result of common sense, even when it is most innovative. (Charles Rosen New York Review of Books)Kerman brings to the discussion of concertos his distinctive vision of American musicology, taking account of its adventures, its limitations and its excesses. He combines varied styles of criticism without losing his enchantment with the music...Kerman is relaxed, learned and deliberately unsystematic, probing here, redefining there, supplementing the music--some of which is available on an attached CD--with vivid analytic description that at its best can change how we hear. (Edward Rothstein New York Times)[A] graceful set of ruminations. (Richard Taruskin New York Times)Joseph Kerman's series of Norton Lectures on [concertos] could not be more timely. The first beneficial effect is to encourage reflection on the music itself, freed from the flashy trappings the 'music industry' may have forced on it...Kerman's theme, so simple and obvious, is the drama and narrative of the concerto. He aims to describe the situation and events of the concerto in human terms...Kerman's descriptions are cheekily up to the minute, and the assignation of roles to soloist and orchestra becomes something of a party game...The author plays this light-hearted game with considerable perspicacity...Present-day composers should pay particular heed to Kerman's illuminating ideas. Audiences still listen to concertos, and there are major soloists willing to be involved in the developments of something new...Snobbery still surrounds the idea of the concerto, particularly its liveliest, most human aspects. This persuasive little book argues very successively for an end to such self-denial, and suggests that the concerto could have an ebullient creative future. (Judith Weir Times Literary Supplement)Where many classical music 'self-help' books are faintly condescending in tone, this one tends towards the inspirational as Kerman swoops joyously in the concerto and exposes the drama of its shimmering textures, pounding rhythms and high-tension dialogues between soloist and orchestra. (Arminta Wallace Irish Times)As the title implies, Kerman writes in a conversational tone--full of enthusiasm and insight. (R. Pitts Choice)[An] engaging, intelligent book. (Bonnie Jo Dopp Library Journal)Kerman cites many warhorses and a few seldom heard fillies in the concertante repertoire to show how resourceful composers have met the challenges of the grand musical dialogue that is a concerto. Including 46 printed musical examples and a CD of others, this is a marvelous book for music lovers, especially because Kerman is such a good conversationalist. (Ray Olson Booklist) Read more About the Author Joseph Kerman is Professor Emeritus of Music, University of California at Berkeley, and the Charles Eliot Norton Lecturer at Harvard University for 1997-98. Read more
Reviews
Given the popularity of the concerto -- it isn't easy to attend a symphony concert that doesn't have one on the program -- you'd think there'd be a wider-ranging conversation in print about the musical relationships between soloist(s) and orchestra that doesn't just stop at all-purpose words like "dramatic." It's useful, though, to keep the metaphor of drama in mind as we listen, for as Joseph Kerman argues in these lectures, there's a good deal of roleplaying going on in concertos.But first, in describing the kinds of duality we hear in them, Kerman suggests the terms "polarity," "reciprocity" and "diffusion." Polarity, in which orchestra and solo play different musical material without sharing it, is typical of the early 18th century; reciprocity, in which the concerto agents share musical material between them, is typical of the Classical and Romantic eras; and diffusion witnesses the integration of soloist and orchestra in much post-Romantic music.Within these modes, Kerman anthropomorphises solo and orchestra into any number of roles the music suggests: "EAVESDROPPER, TEASE, SURVIVOR, VICTIM, MOURNER, MINX, LOVER, CRITIC, EDITOR..." It's fun, for example, to read of piano and orchestra in the third movement of Mozart's D minor concerto locked together like pitbulls, or to see Chaikovsky's (yes, Kerman spells it that way) violin concerto described as the quasi-narrative of a mistress whose servant, the orchestra, evolves into her critic and equal partner.Speaking of critics, in particular those who seem embarrassed by virtuoso display, Kerman construes virtuosity to encompass bravura (chops), mimesis (mimicry, especially vocal), and spontaneity, and argues that in the absence of display, you don't have a concerto; you have a symphony with an obbligato solo part. Spontaneity (or the ability to make through-composed music sound spontaneous) is the essence of virtuosity. He praises the Liszt piano concertos ("a hard sell," he admits) and leaves us with the wonderful reminder that "listening to flawed virtuosity is like watching college football -- a site of empathy and rapture for fans and alumni, but noplace on the scale of aesthetic experience."The CD of concerto movements that comes with this book is, of course, useless until you convert it to MP3 files. How else are you gonna cue up those musical examples when you're reading on the go?
