A work that general readers will enjoy and the musical cognoscenti will devour.
The edited texts of six engaging conversations about music between the celebrated Japanese writer and the noted conductor who led the Boston Symphony Orchestra for nearly 30 years.
Although Murakami (The Strange Library, 2014, etc.) identifies himself as an “amateur,” we learn throughout these discussions that he has been a longtime collector of classical recordings, a longtime listener, and a habitual member of audiences at classical concerts and operas. His knowledge of music is beyond impressive, as anyone who has read his novels already knows. He loves jazz, and one of the most interesting passages involves exchanges about blues in Chicago in the 1960s. Ozawa also declares a deep admiration for Louis Armstrong. Each conversation focuses on a certain aspect of Ozawa’s career, and the flow is generally chronological. We learn about his early experiences with Leonard Bernstein, and throughout, the conductor praises his early mentor, Hideo Saito; a later exchange deals comprehensively with the group Ozawa helped establish in his honor, the Saito Kinen Orchestra. Ozawa is quick to praise—individual musicians, older conductors, composers, orchestras (Cleveland gets a couple of nice nods)—and hardly says a discouraging word about anyone or anything, save his early experience conducting Tosca in Milan when he was startled to hear booing. (It disappeared as his engagement went along, however.) Although Murakami occasionally notes similarities and/or differences between the lives of a conductor and a writer—he mentions that both he and Ozawa begin working before dawn—the focus is almost entirely on music and on Ozawa’s career. We learn a lot about his work habits—for example, his fierce study of scores in preparation for performances—and his techniques for handling the immense demands on his time. He also states a deep conviction that the conductor’s task is to “convert the music exactly as it’s written into actual sound.”
A work that general readers will enjoy and the musical cognoscenti will devour.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-35434-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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