Post by mcginn on Dec 15, 2011 0:44:15 GMT -5
A knowledgeable and excellent writer using the handle "Gerontius" has just published the first review of Charles Barber's "Corresponding With Carlos" on www.Amazon.com.
Here is his review:
"This [book] has been a long time in the oven, but the pie is truly worth waiting for - and delicious! For Kleiber aficionados this book is pure GOLD.
This is no ordinary biography. Because of Kleiber's reclusiveness and unwillingness to give interviews to the press or potential biographers, the details of his early life are somewhat sketchy, the whole decade of his twenties and the dawn of his early career and the exact process by which he acquired the skills to go along with his great talent remain elusive. Barber offers the first English language attempt at a formal discussion. So far so good............
What is special about the book are the insights into Kleiber's psyche we can derive from the extensive correspondence that he and Barber kept up over many years. Barber as a student conductor had access to videos and recordings at Stanford University which he would shoot off to CK and these would provoke discussion of their contents, frequently to both insightful and very funny effect. These letters, faxes and postcards to Barber (as well as others to certain musicians and impresarios) portray Kleiber's complex personality in a way that enables the reader to understand the conductor as much more than the received wisdom of "weird, enigmatic, cancel-prone, skittish and indecipherable." Finally this is a chance to understand more about the man - which is what Biography is about.
There are numerous hysterically funny descriptions of fellow conductors and their perceived foibles, there is the well-known debunking of Celibidache, with a good deal more detail than I have seen before. The overarching themes in Kleiber's correspondence are his perpetual self-doubt, relentless self-criticism and search for perfection in performance. At the same time we learn much of what it means to be an artist, a performer and a musician in the jet set world. Kleiber is the antithesis to Gergiev who conducts a lot of things in a lot of places on a lot of occasions. Kleiber conducted hardly at all, and this book seeks with success to explain why.
Well done Mr Barber. You have done for Kleiber and his reputation what Oliver Daniel did for Stokowski in "Stokowski - A Counterpoint of View." You have shone a light and illuminated the life of the greatest conductor of the twentieth century, and you have done it well.
Recommended unreservedly. 300+ pages of gold. We Alberichs would give everything for this. So $75 is not so bad."
Obviously Gerontius has given this new Kleiber-related "product" five radiant stars!
Regards,
RM
Here is his review:
"This [book] has been a long time in the oven, but the pie is truly worth waiting for - and delicious! For Kleiber aficionados this book is pure GOLD.
This is no ordinary biography. Because of Kleiber's reclusiveness and unwillingness to give interviews to the press or potential biographers, the details of his early life are somewhat sketchy, the whole decade of his twenties and the dawn of his early career and the exact process by which he acquired the skills to go along with his great talent remain elusive. Barber offers the first English language attempt at a formal discussion. So far so good............
What is special about the book are the insights into Kleiber's psyche we can derive from the extensive correspondence that he and Barber kept up over many years. Barber as a student conductor had access to videos and recordings at Stanford University which he would shoot off to CK and these would provoke discussion of their contents, frequently to both insightful and very funny effect. These letters, faxes and postcards to Barber (as well as others to certain musicians and impresarios) portray Kleiber's complex personality in a way that enables the reader to understand the conductor as much more than the received wisdom of "weird, enigmatic, cancel-prone, skittish and indecipherable." Finally this is a chance to understand more about the man - which is what Biography is about.
There are numerous hysterically funny descriptions of fellow conductors and their perceived foibles, there is the well-known debunking of Celibidache, with a good deal more detail than I have seen before. The overarching themes in Kleiber's correspondence are his perpetual self-doubt, relentless self-criticism and search for perfection in performance. At the same time we learn much of what it means to be an artist, a performer and a musician in the jet set world. Kleiber is the antithesis to Gergiev who conducts a lot of things in a lot of places on a lot of occasions. Kleiber conducted hardly at all, and this book seeks with success to explain why.
Well done Mr Barber. You have done for Kleiber and his reputation what Oliver Daniel did for Stokowski in "Stokowski - A Counterpoint of View." You have shone a light and illuminated the life of the greatest conductor of the twentieth century, and you have done it well.
Recommended unreservedly. 300+ pages of gold. We Alberichs would give everything for this. So $75 is not so bad."
Obviously Gerontius has given this new Kleiber-related "product" five radiant stars!
Regards,
RM