A01=Paul Griffiths
Alban Berg
Author_Paul Griffiths
Bela Bartok
Bernd Alois Zimmermann
Category=AVA
Claude Debussy
Claude Vivier
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Ernst Krenek
Frederick Chopin
Fryderyk Chopin
George Frideric Handel
Giuseppe Verdi
Gustav Mahler
Gyorgy Kurtag
Gyorgy Ligeti
Hans Werner Henze
Henry Purcell
Iannis Xenakis
Igor Stravinsky
John Dowland
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Luciano Berio
Ludwig van Beethoven
Luigi Nono
Maurice Ravel
Mauricio Kagel
Olivier Messiaen
Pierre Boulez
Sergei Prokofiev
Steve Reich
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Zoltan Jeney
Product details
- ISBN 9781580462068
- Weight: 720g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 15 Sep 2005
- Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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A choice selection of essays, reviews and interviews providing insights into musical performance, composition in the late 20th century and very early 21st, and the nature of opera.
Paul Griffiths offers his own personal selection of some of his most substantial and imaginative articles and concert reviews from over three decades of indefatigable concertgoing around the world. He reports on premieres and other important performances of works by such composers as Elliott Carter, Sofia Gubaidulina, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Steve Reich, as well as Harrison Birtwistle and other important British figures.
Griffiths vividly conveys the vision, aura, and idiosyncrasies of prominent pianists, singers, and conductors [such as Herbert von Karajan], and debates changing styles of performing Monteverdi and Purcell. A particular delight is his response to the worldof opera, including Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande [six contrasting productions], Pavarotti and Domingo in Verdi at New York's Metropolitan Opera, Schoenberg's Moses and Aaron, and two wildly different Jonathan Miller versions of Mozart's Don Giovanni.
From the author's preface: "We cannot say what music is. Yet we are verbal creatures, and strive with words to cast a net around it, knowing most of this immaterial stuff will evadecapture. The stories that follow cover a wide range of events over a period of great change. Yet the net's aim was always the same, to catch the substance of things heard.
"Criticism has to work largely by analogy and metaphor. This is no limitation. It is largely through such verbal ties that music is linked to other sorts of experience, not least the natural world and the orchestra of our feelings."
Paul Griffiths's reviews and articleshave appeared extensively in both Britain [Times, Financial Times, Times Literary Supplement] and the United States [New Yorker, New York Times]. He has written numerous books on Bartók, Cage, Messiaen, Boulez, Maxwell Davies, twentieth-century music, opera, and the string quartet, and is the author of the recent Penguin Companion to Classical Music. He is also author of The Sea on Fire: Jean Barraqué.
