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Life & Works - Johannes Brahms
- Narrated by: Jeremy Siepmann, Jasper Britton, Karen Archer, Elaine Claxton, Neville Jason, Nicholas Boulton, David Timson
- Length: 4 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged Audiobook
- Release date: 11-12-12
- Language: English
- Publisher: Naxos AudioBooks
Regular price: $24.49
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The 20th century was a hotbed of musical exploration, innovation, and transformation unlike any other epoch in history. Ranging across the century in its entirety, these 24 lectures present a musical cornucopia of astounding dimensions - a major presentation and exploration of the incredible brilliance and diversity of musical art across a turbulent century. Far more than simply a series of lectures, the program comprises a huge and many-sided resource for discovering the endless riches of 20th-century concert music across the globe.
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From Gregorian Chant to Henryk Gorecki, the first living classical composer to get into the pop album charts, here is the fascinating story of over a thousand years of Western classical music and the composers who have sought to express in music the deepest of human feelings and emotions. Also available: The History of Opera.
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Derived from a popular series of lecture-recitals presented by Carol Montparker over the past several years, The Composer's Landscape features eight insightful essays on the piano repertoire. Each chapter focuses on a single composer: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Chopin, and Mendelssohn. Montparker uses landscape as a metaphor for the score, whether it's a well-tended garden of Mozart or the thorny thickets on a Schumann page.
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Between 1861 and 1865, the clash of the greatest armies the Western hemisphere had ever seen turned small towns, little-known streams, and obscure meadows in the American countryside into names we will always remember. In those great battles, those streams ran red with blood-and the United States was truly born.
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During a 68-year career, conductor Arturo Toscanini (1867-1957) was famed for his fierce dedication, photographic memory, explosive temper, and impassioned performances. At various times he dominated La Scala, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, the NBC Symphony, and the Bayreuth, Salzburg, and Lucerne festivals. His reforms influenced generations of musicians, and his opposition to Nazism and fascism made him a model for artists of conscience.
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Editorial Reviews
Unlike the Naxos musical biographies of composers, this is an anatomical dissection of a single noteworthy piece of music. In terms more familiar to music professionals than to beginners ("a harmonic wash of pure pianistic tone colour"), Siepmann analyzes the construction, difficulty, unconventionality, and beauty of Brahms's second piano concerto. His technique is to say a few words about a musical passage and then present it piecemeal, working step by step through the entire work. Finally, we hear the whole movement with much more appreciation than before.
Publisher's Summary
Brahms is one of the best loved yet most controversial of all the Romantics. Almost uniquely, his works have never suffered the slightest period of eclipse. Profoundly emotional yet governed by an iron discipline, the music, like the man, is a fascinating, entertaining, often deeply moving blend of opposites. He had a gift for friendship and a capacity for love far beyond the ordinary, yet no man could be ruder or more hurtful. Though humble, he was consumed by a sense of destiny, and his inner life, colored by his adoration and fear of women, found expression in some of the greatest music ever written.
Listening to this audio-biography is leaping inside the life and times of a great German Romantic, understanding the man who was haunted by the ghost of Beethoven for years and was 43 before he wrote his first symphony.
What members say
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
- Amazon Customer
- 05-24-17
Excellent introduction.
What a delight! The combination of life story , musical interludes and the extracts from letters etc read by actors makes this a very engaging and informative introduction to the life and works of the composer . I enjoyed it very much and the format held my attention and interest throughout.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Rodney Wetherell
- 02-24-17
Fine study of Brahms' life & work
I love Brahms but knew little about his life. This filled the gap very well.