An entertaining rogue
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Norman Lebrecht is an extremely entertaining writer though somewhat of a rogue, I fear, in that he does tend to use his material to sustain his own highly subjective arguments. In that he can be described in the same breath as documentary film maker Michael Moore. This book sets out to prove Lebrecht's theory that the classical music inductry has been brought to its knees chiefly by the corporate greed of individuals and power-players. Herbert von Karajan is a chief villain of the piece - probably in Lebrecht's eyes he was also responsible for World War 2 as well! Some facts are also questionable - I thought Glenn Gould played Beethoven's op 109 at his US debut not the Hammerklavier. But Lebrecht is never less than entertaining and it's worth reading this for his amusing turns of phrase. But do treat some of the conclusions with a pinch of salt.
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Entertaining but not as rigorous as it could be
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This is really a book of two halves. The first half is a narrative describing the rise and fall of Classical music recording as a commercial activity. Lebrecht's prose is a pleasure to read, and he has a gift for phrases that stick in the mind. However, during the latter part of the story especially, events that take place many years apart, or out of sequence, are placed together in the narrative so as to sustain the argument.
The second half describing 100 great and 20 terrible recordings is an entertaining and well-written piece of criticism; for the most part Lebrecht's views won't ruffle the feathers of anyone familiar with Gramophone or the Penguin Guide but it is good to get some background to the recordings as well as some nice anecdotes, for example Jacqueline Du Pre bursting into tears after the first playback of her (famous and enduring) recording of the Elgar concerto and saying "That's not at all what I meant!".
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