Montiverdi Reviews

This is a great book for anyone interested in early music. The beginner will find handy, concise definitions of most of the common terms, styles, instruments, and forms, as well as biographies of major composers. The more advanced early music enthusiast will find it an invaluable source for program notes and ideas, and teachers and ensemble directors will make much use of it as well.
As an aside, it's GREAT to see that this book's definition of the period known as "Early Music" ends with the time of Monteverdi.

More than 50 years after its publication, Professor Bukofzer's book remains as an examplar of how to discuss musical style. His revelatory insights into the origins and details of Baroque style have set standards respected and imitated by generations of scholars. Another beauty of the book is the clarity and accessibility of his ideas. Performers, amateurs, and scholars will all find many interesting ideas in this book. Some details of chronology and attribution of music have since been corrected in more recent scholarly books, but the real value of this book is in the excellent discussions of the origin of style, and Bokofzer's gift is timeless. Anyone who reads music and has an interest in Baroque music will find this book to be well-written and of immense value.

It's easy as a listener to get caught up in the impact of great music on us today and to ignore the people who brought it about in the first place. Kelly has done a wonderful job of enlightening and enlivening my experience of these five works, four of which I've spent a lot of time with over the years. He brings together stories on the composition, the cultural setting, and the nuts and bolts of putting on the first performances in a way that both academics and popular readers will appreciate.

This book brings together an extraordinary amount of interesting information about 5 of the greatest works of Western music, in the context of trying to recreate their first performances. Kelly writes with the interest of an enthusiast, but the scholarly background is immense, as befits a university press book. Plenty of interesting illustrations and diagrams, and interesting pull-quotes in boxes, break up the text, enhancing readability. I had not previously been aware that the version heard at the first concert of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique was subjected to significant rewriting before being published in the form performed today -- this is typical of the interesting insights the book adds to common knowledge. Also, that Berlioz changed the selection of wind instruments, but that one can hear many of the originals on some recent recordings. My only disappointment was that Kelly stopped at 5 works - I would love a similar work-up of first performances of the Wagner Ring Cycle, Mozart's Figaro, and a major work of Mahler - perhaps the first performance of the 8th Symphony. I guess that just means that Kelly might profitably prepare a sequel!

Although this book is a good basic overview of travel in Italy, it is written in an unnecessarily pedantic style. I found other travel guides on Italy to be much more reader-friendly and useful.

The great asset of the Cadogan series is the in-depth historical and cultural context that the authors set their desciptions in. While all of the usual nuts-and-bolts information on hotels, restaurants, nighlife, etc. is there, the emphasis is on really getting to know and appreciate the cultures you are travelling through, rather than just being able to name the Top 5 sights in each city and take home postcard shots of each. If you read this book, you'll come away with a whole new appreciation for the country and its people, and you'll understand why you've decided to travel there in the first place.

When some years ago I was given by an American friend of mine a copy of this guide, I soon noticed that many information (e. g. telephone numbers of museums, names of bus companies) on the area in Tuscany where I live were outdated. So I wrote the authors a short letter with new numbers, names etc. Two weeks ago I saw the 6th ed. of the guide in a Florentine bookshop, but the wrong numbers, names etc. were always the same! They were not corrected!!! I wonder why!

I've been to Tuscany ten times over the past decade and have always used Cadogan, to my mind still the best out of the scores of other guides that have sprung up since, including the Rough Guide. They may not always get the phone numbers right, but the authors' make each corner of this beautiful region come alive with their knowledge and witty writing. The new 6th edition has a greatly expanded section on the Marches-a lovely region that no other book in English covers very well at all.