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Behind the extraordinary sound of the voice of ‘the last castrato’ lies a strange and lonely life lived in the shadow of great events and institutions, a personality glimpsed by inference and allusion.
Singer Nicholas Clapton first visited Budapest to record a recently discovered mass by an almost unknown eighteenth-century Hungarian composer. There, he discovered a striking sense of otherness in spite of Hungary’s central geographical and cultural position within Europe. And with that, a deep passion for the city was born. Budapest offers an engaging and affectionate look at this beautiful capital from the perspective of a musician who lived and worked there for many years. With rich musical traditions, both classical and folk, and possessing a language like almost no other, Hungary is in the process of abandoning the trappings of its communist past while attempting to preserve its cult...
Known as the 'Angel of Rome,' Alessandro Moreschi was the last surviving castrato singer of the Vatican choir, and the only castrati whose voice was recorded. Its ethereal, haunting quality was highly prized for centuries in the papal basilicas and opera houses of Europe (readers can request a copy on CD using details in the book). The castrati tradition was established in Italy in the sixteenth century by Pope Clement VIII, and by the seventeenth century had moved onto the secular operatic stage, where castrato singers were feted as the 'pop stars' of their day. No other singers came close to matching their fame and notoriety. By the nineteenth century, however, their very existence had bec...
Duende y Duelos : the Andalusian spirit in the Lorca settings / Anthony Gilbert -- An interplay of passion and spirit : The nightingale's to blame / Richard E. McGregor -- Images in sound : movement, harmony and colour in the early music / Philip Rupprecht -- Myth and narrative in 3 for Icarus / Edward Venn -- Sound, sense and syntax : the Emily Dickinson settings / Steph Power -- Piano music / Stephen Gutman -- Redefining the cello's voice : musical agency in feet of clay / Rebecca Thumpston -- Performance and reflections : Holt's music for oboe and cor anglais / Melinda Maxwell -- Shaking the bars : the yellow wallpaper / Steph Power -- Listening to the river's road : stance, texture and space in the concertos / David Beard -- Orchestral works in performance / Thierry Fischer -- Oblique themes and still centres : a conversation between / Julia Bardsley and Simon Holt -- Sketching and idea-gathering / Simon Speare -- Art, conceptualism and politics in Holt's music / David Charlton
The Modern Castrato: Gaetano Guadagni and the Coming of a New Operatic Age chronicles the career of the most significant castrato of the second half of the eighteenth-century. Guadagni may have been the only singer of the time fully able to understand the demands and opportunities of this reform, as well to possess the intelligence and self-knowledge to realize that it suited his skills, limitations and temperament perfectly--making him the first castrato to embrace the concepts of modern singing.
In her persuasively argued study, Patricia Pulham astutely combines psychoanalytic theory with socio-historical criticism to examine a selection of fantastic tales by the female aesthete and intellectual Vernon Lee (Violet Paget, 1856-1935). Lee's own definition of the supernatural in the preface to Hauntings questions the nature of the 'genuine ghost', and argues that this figure is not found in the Society of Psychical Research but in our own psyches, where it functions as a mediator between past and present. Using D.W. Winnicott's 'transitional object' theory, which maintains that adults transfer their childhood engagement with toys to art and cultural artifacts, Pulham argues that the prevalence of the past in Lee's tales signifies not only an historical but a psychic past. Thus the 'ghosts' that haunt Lee's supernatural fiction, as well as her aesthetic, psychological, and historical writings, held complex meanings for her that were fundamental to her intellectual development and allowed her to explore alternative identities that permit the expression of transgressive sexualities.
The use of high male voices in the past has long been one of the most seriously misunderstood areas of musical scholarship and practice. In opening up this rich subject (to readers of all sorts) with refreshingly clear perspectives and plenty of new material, Simon Ravens' well-researched book goes a very long way to rectifying matters. Ravens writes damnably well, and if the story that emerges is necessarily a complex one, his treatment of it is always engagingly comprehensible.' ANDREW PARROTT Tracing the origins, influences and development of falsetto singing in Western music, Simon Ravens offers a revisionist history of high male singing from the Ancient Greeks to Michael Jackson. This h...
With Passionate Voice gives modern singers of Renaissance music the tools to learn and master the art of "re-creative singing." Providing a much-needed historically-informed perspective, author Robert Toft discusses the music of composers ranging from Marchetto Cara to John Dowland in the context of late Renaissance rhetoric, modal theory, and performance traditions.
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) dominated the cultural and literary life of post-war France. He believed from an early age that he had a mission to be a writer and proceeded to realize this as a novelist, philosopher, screenwriter, playwright, literary and art critic, biographer, essayist, polemicist and journalist. Although before the Second World War, Sartre showed little inclination to become involved in politics, from 1945 he established himself as the very personification of intellectual commitment, taking public positions on national and international political issues from the Liberation until very shortly before his death. In this new biography, David Drake considers the works of Franceâs most famous twentieth-century intellectual, his relations with his contemporaries, and the political causes he espoused, all of which the author firmly locates in the turbulent times through which Sartre lived.