A Singer's Notebook
Ian Bostridge
A Singer's Notebook
Ian Bostridge is perhaps our most famous tenor. Yet his early career was that of a professional historian, and A Singer's Notebook takes a look at the multifaceted world of classical music through the eyes of someone whose career as a singer has followed a unusual trajectory. Consisting of short essays and reviews written since 1997, some in diary form, it ranges widely over issues serious (music and transcendence) and not so serious (the singer's battles with phlegm), while inevitably discussing many of the composers with whom Bostridge has become identified, such as Britten, Henze, Janacek, Schubert, Weill and Wolf. Ultimately it returns to the theme of his earlier work on seventeenth century witchcraft - what place can there be for the ineffable in a world defined by an iron cage of rationality? Including a foreword by sociologist Richard Sennett.
3.1 out of 5 based on 5 reviews
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Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Non-fiction |
| Genre |
Biography, Music, Stage & Screen |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
272 |
| RRP |
£16.99 |
| Date of Publication |
September 2011 |
| ISBN |
978-0571252459 |
| Publisher |
Faber & Faber |
| |
Ian Bostridge is perhaps our most famous tenor. Yet his early career was that of a professional historian, and A Singer's Notebook takes a look at the multifaceted world of classical music through the eyes of someone whose career as a singer has followed a unusual trajectory. Consisting of short essays and reviews written since 1997, some in diary form, it ranges widely over issues serious (music and transcendence) and not so serious (the singer's battles with phlegm), while inevitably discussing many of the composers with whom Bostridge has become identified, such as Britten, Henze, Janacek, Schubert, Weill and Wolf. Ultimately it returns to the theme of his earlier work on seventeenth century witchcraft - what place can there be for the ineffable in a world defined by an iron cage of rationality? Including a foreword by sociologist Richard Sennett.
Reviews
The Sunday Times
Adam Lively
"Bostridge writes particularly well about Handel ... because he, perhaps uniquely, is in a position to combine an 18th-century historian’s depth of contextual understanding with an insider’s knowledge of how this music works vocally ... Elsewhere, one might disagree with some of his generalisations (his lofty dismissal of recent advances in the understanding of music provided by neuroscience and evolutionary anthropology, for example), but reading this sparkling collection leaves one keen for more, in less truncated form."
02/10/2011
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The Independent
Michael Church
"... when gown and mortar-board are thrown away he's an engaging writer — provocative, astringent, capable of arresting insights."
30/09/2011
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The Daily Telegraph
Igor Toronyi-Lalic
"Many of these essays were written, he says, as an exercise to loosen up his writing. It works. As Hugo Wolf said of his own stylistic development (quoted in an essay on the composer), “After a lot of groping, the button came undone.” Bostridge’s early formal style is freed in the journalistic furnace of his later pieces."
22/09/2011
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The Sunday Telegraph
Ivan Hewett
"Occasionally one feels genuine heat in Bostridge’s careful prose, but when that goes out, as it does in some of the shorter pieces, carefulness veers towards preciousness ... We must hope one day he writes a real book, but in the meantime the nuggets of insight here are well worth seeking out."
15/09/2011
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The Times
Neil Fisher
"Bostridge is most effective in larger forms than compressed into the rough and tumble of a daily newspaper, where the need for concision clips his intellectual wings. Understandably, it is the composers with whom he has been most associated — Britten, Schubert, Handel — that he explores most often ...
And Bostridge the artist? There is less of him than you might expect from a singer’s notebook."
17/09/2011
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