Product Description

The concerto has attracted relatively little attention as a genre, Joseph Kerman observes, and his urbane and wide-ranging Norton Lectures fill the gap in a way that will delight all music listeners. Kerman addresses the full range of the concerto repertory, treating both the general and the particular. His perceptive commentary on individual works--with illustrative performances on the accompanying CD--is alive with enthusiasm, intimations, and insights into the spirit of concerto.

Concertos model human relationships, according to Kerman, and his description of the conversation between solo instrument and orchestra brings this observation vividly to life. What does the solo instrument do when it first enters in a concerto? How do composers balance claims of solo-orchestra contrast and solo virtuosity? When do they deploy the sumptuous musical textures that only concertos can provide? Kerman's unexpected answers offer a new understanding of the concerto and a stimulus to enhanced listening.

In language that the Boston Globe's Richard Dyer calls "always delightfully vivid," Kerman conducts readers and listeners into the conversations that concertos so eloquently enact. Amid the musical forces at play, he renews the dialogue of music lovers with the language of the concerto--the familiar, the lesser-known, the cherished, and the undervalued. The CD packaged with the book contains movements from works that Kerman treats most intensively--by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Bartók, Stravinsky, and Prokofiev.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1600640 in Books
• Published on: 1999-10-29
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.37 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 192 pages

From Amazon.com
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

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.

Review
Kerman manages to be both intelligent and intelligible...[writing] for the bright layman, as academicians did once upon a time.
--Alex Ross (New Republic )

Splendid, entertaining, original, and often profound...
--Charles Rosen (New York Review of Books )

[A] graceful set of ruminations.
--Richard Taruskin (New York Times )

..Present-day composers should pay particular heed to Kerman's illuminating ideas.
--Judith Weir (Times Literary Supplement )