For those (and anyone else here) who's read either Hill/Simeone or any of the other recent Messiaen books: the four that I have read (Sherlaw Johnson, Nichols, Griffiths, the Hill companion), whilst providing plenty of interesting information in terms of compositional intention, methods, and so on, all still have something of the quality of hagiographies - never really standing back and looking more from any critical distance at Messiaen's whole methods, aesthetics, ideologies (including to do with nature and Catholicism), relationship to romantic and modern ideals in a way that doesn't necessarily place him at the centre of things, and so on (of course this could be said of an awful lot of writing about post-1945 music, which lags a long way behind that on music from earlier periods, often because the writers are too close to the composers, just as some nineteenth-century writers were). Would you say any of these new books are any different in that respect?

  Spent a pleasant hour this morning browsing through my bookshelves and, as usual, several hours have lapsed with a whole pile of books now adding to the general clutter.

I retreated to a seat in the garden to revisit 'It's All In The Music', The Life & Work of Pierre Monteux by Doris Monteux.   Ostensibly a gentle writing style but there is an underlayer of steel in her comments.     A retrospective look, over 6 decades from the mid-60s, covering the early years in Paris, The Ballet Russe; Diaghilev & Stravinsky; The Meropolitan Opera: The BSO; Return to Europe and The Concertgebouw: School for Conductors - San Francisco SO - Monteux in Israel.   Appendices include Rules for Young Conductors, Monteux Premieres and a Discography.

I like the dedication:
               
I can do almost all that you can do,
But I have what you have not - the Past,
And a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things,
For what has been, and I have had my hours.

                                              J.R. Planche

Charles Mackerras - A Musicians Musician

My Life & Music - Part II includes Reflections on Music - Artur Schnabel

Speak Low - The Letters of Kurt Weill & Lotte Lenya

Notes of Seven Decades   -   Antal Dorati

Reggie - The Life of Reginald Goodall     -     John Lucas

Those 20th Century Blues   -    Michael Tippett

The Memoirs of Berlioz     -    David Cairns

Testimony; The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich  -  As related to and edited by Solomon Volkov (the argument continues...!)

Solo - The biography of Solomon   -    Bryan Crimp

The Lamberts; George, Constant & Kit   -  Andrew Motion

Publications on John Culshaw:

Putting the Record Straight
Relections on Wagner's Ring
Ring Resounding
Wagner; The Man & His Music

Inside one of them I found the Royal Opera House brochure for the 1976/77 Season of the Ring cycle.     Conducted by Colin Davis;  Producer Gotz Friedrich; Sets Josef Svoboda;    Wotan Donald McIntyre/Norman Bailey; Brunnhilde Berit Lindholm/Katalin Kasza; Siegmund Rene Kollo/Peter Hofmann; Sieglinde Marita Napier; Hunding Aage Haugland
Prices:  Orchestra Stalls/ Grand Tier £15 & £11:  Balcony Stalls £11  Amphi £5  50p to £1  40!             The past is indeed a far country but, at that time I recall regularly getting a side seat in the first few rows of the main Amphi block for £1 - personal booking only when I applied promptly on the day booking opened.


My wide Wagner collection includes the Ernest Newman's The Life of Richard Wagner (4 vols) and Wagner Nights.   Riches indeed but, somehow, I'm most attracted to Bryan Magee's 'Aspects of Wagner' a 35p paperback which always stimulate.

Lighter reading is provided by two delightful memoirs of the Amadeus Quartet; 'The Amadeus Quartet - The Men and the Music' and '
Married to the Amadeus'.

'A Voice from the Pit - Reminiscences of an Orchestral Musician' covers the career of Richard Temple Savage;  ( "The wizard of the bass clarinets" wrote David Cairns in The Financial Times;) from 1925 - 1963.    Later in his career, he played at Covent garden, as well as being chief librarian.  Fascinating to get an insight of the pre-war LPO; the wartime tours with them under the aegis of its Marxist director, Thomas Russell.    He gives his personal accolade to five 'giants'; Felix Weingartner, Erich Kleiber, Clemens Krauss, Rudolph Kempe and Carlo Maria Giulini.

The memoir was published by David & Charles (I always associate them with Julian & Sandy) in 1988       The dedication:

"The rest may reason and welcome; 'tis we musicians know." 

I have a book called "Cesar Franck and his circle" - from what I can tell having dipped into it from time to time, it looks very interesting but I've not read it all yet (the stack of books I have beside the bed must be 3 ft high)

Among those of English writers on composers and performers Sydney Grew's the Elder as we have already elsewhere intimated and indeed indicated are the most absorbing books. Particularly riveting are his accounts of men and women with whom he had personal acquaintance, videlicet "Our Favourite Musicians" of 1922 with chapters on Stanford, Elgar, the Dame Smyth, Delius, Bantock, Walford Davies, Dr. Williams, Holst, Boughton and Holbrooke; and "Favourite Musical Performers" of 1923 with chapters on Henry Wood, Beecham, Julius Harrison, Rosina Buckman the Antipodean who began to sing while yet a baby, Frank Mullings, Robert Radford, John Coates, Richard Terry, T. W. North, Albert Sammons and Landon Ronald. He knew them all and his books are full of delightful anecdotes found nowhere else. Not only that but he was a really nice man:

Indubitably, GG: how otherwise to describe this latest howler from member Grew, particularly in view of his recent insistence yet again that " As almost always in what we write we see accuracy of a standard seldom approached by other contributors."? I would not contest this for a moment, of course, being well aware inter alia that his idiosyncratic use of phonetic spelling displays exactly such a unique standard of accuracy.

I assume the older definition of nice is meant.