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19 produkter
19 produkter
Häftad, Engelska, 2019
201 kr
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SHORTLISTED FOR THE ROYAL PHILHARMONIC SOCIETY AWARD FOR STORYTELLINGClaude Debussy was that rare creature, a composer who reinvented the language of music without alienating the majority of music lovers. He is the modernist everyone loves. How did he manage this? Was it through the association of his music with visual images, or was it simply that, by throwing out the rule book of the Paris Conservatoire where he studied, his music put beauty of sound above the spiritual ambitions of the German tradition from which those rules derived.Stephen Walsh's thought-provoking biography, told partly through the events of Debussy's life, and partly through a critical discussion of his music, addresses these and other questions about one of the most influential composers of the early twentieth century.
E-bok
Engelska, 2013222 kr
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The emergence of Russian classical music in the nineteenth century in the wake of Mikhail Glinka comprises one of the most remarkable and fascinating stories in all musical history. The five men who came together in the Russian capital of St. Petersburg in the 1860s, all composers of talent, some of genius, would be—in spite of a virtual lack of technical training—responsible for some of the greatest and best-loved music ever written. How this happened is the subject of Stephen Walsh''s brilliant composite portrait of the group known in the West as the Five, and in Russia as moguchaya kuchka—the Mighty Little Heap. Friends, competitors, and creative intellectuals whose ambitions and ideas reflect the ferment of their times, Mily Balakirev, César Cui, Alexander Borodin, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, and—most important of all—Modest Musorgsky, come wonderfully to life in this extended account.The detail is engrossing. We see Borodin composing music while conducting research in chemistry (“he would jump up and run back to the laboratory to make sure nothing had burnt out or boiled over there, meanwhile filling the corridor with improbable sequences of ninths or sevenths”); Balakirev tutoring Musorgsky (“Balakirev could not remedy the defects in his pupil’s character, but he could confront him with works of genius”); Cui doggedly producing operas during breaks from his career as a military fortifications instructor. Musorgsky asserts his independence, moving from writing songs and the showpiece Night on Bald Mountain to the magnificent Boris Godunov, meanwhile struggling against poverty and depression. In the background such important figures as Vissarion Belinsky and Nikolay Chernïshevsky shape the cultural milieu, while the godfather of the kuchka, critic and scholar Vladimir Stasov, is seen offering sometimes combative support. As an experienced and widely skilled musical scholar and biographer (his two-volume life of Stravinsky has been called “one of the best books ever written about a musician”), Stephen Walsh is exceptionally wellplaced to tell this story. He does so with deep understanding and panache, making Musorgksy and His Circle both important and a delight to read.
Häftad, Engelska, 2003
264 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
Widely regarded as the greatest composer of the twentieth century, Igor Stravinsky was central to the development of modernism in art, yet no dependable biography of him exists. Previous studies have drawn too heavily from his own unreliable memoirs and conversations, and until now no biographer has possessed both the musical knowledge to evaluate his art and the linguistic proficiency needed to explore the documentary background of his life--a life whose span extended from tsarist Russia to Switzerland, France, and ultimately the United States. In this revealing volume, the first of two, Stephen Walsh follows Stravinsky from his birth in 1882 to 1934. He traces the composer's early Russian years, laying bare the complicated relationships within his family and showing how he first displayed his extraordinary talents. Stravinsky's brilliantly creative involvement with the Ballets Russes is illuminated by a sharp sense of the internal artistic politics that animated the group. Portraying Stravinsky's circumstances as an emigre in France trying to make his living as a conductor and pianist as well as a composer, Walsh reveals the true roots of his notorious obsession with money.He also describes the nature of his long affair with Vera Sudeykina. While always respecting Stravinsky's own insistence that life and art be kept distinct, Stravinsky makes clear precisely how the development of his music was connected to his life and to the intellectual environment in which he found himself. But at the same time it demonstrates the composer's remarkably pragmatic psychology, which led him to consider the welfare of his art to be of paramount importance, before which everything else had to give way. Walsh, long established as an expert on Stravinsky's music, has drawn upon a vast array of material, much of it unpublished or unavailable in English, to bring the man himself, in all his color and genius, to glowing life.
Häftad, Engelska, 2008
544 kr
Skickas inom 3-6 vardagar
Stephen Walsh's magisterial, engagingly written two-volume "Stravinsky" is the most detailed and extensive work available on the life of the man widely regarded as the greatest composer of the twentieth century. This second volume takes up the composer's story in 1934, in a Europe growing ever more chaotic in the lead-up to World War II. Walsh follows Stravinsky's emigration to the United States, where he courted Hollywood, associated with writers and artists including Aldous Huxley, W.H. Auden, and George Balanchine, began a career as a conductor and recording artist, and composed a string of masterpieces that changed the course of twentieth-century music. "Stravinsky: The Second Exile" takes full account of Russian-language sources, including much correspondence, made available since the composer's death and since the fall of the Soviet Union, and is the first work to thoroughly assess the authenticity of many of the writings published under Stravinsky's name.
Inbunden, Engelska, 1993
782 kr
Skickas inom 7-10 vardagar
Stravinsky's opera-oratorio Oedipus rex is widely acknowledged as one of the most original music-theatre works of the twentieth century. This clear and concise guide is the first ever to be written on this work and it describes the music and its staging in close detail. It offers the first proper explanation of the plot and its relation to its literary sources and provides a fully documented discussion of the origins of Oedipus rex in Stravinsky's own work and thinking. By placing the work in its social context Stephen Walsh paints a vivid picture of Parisian artistic politics in the twenties from which emerges one of the richest and most suggestive works of art of modern times.
Häftad, Engelska, 1993
206 kr
Skickas inom 7-10 vardagar
Stravinsky's opera-oratorio Oedipus rex is widely acknowledged as one of the most original music-theatre works of the twentieth century. This clear and concise guide is the first ever to be written on this work and it describes the music and its staging in close detail. It offers the first proper explanation of the plot and its relation to its literary sources and provides a fully documented discussion of the origins of Oedipus rex in Stravinsky's own work and thinking. By placing the work in its social context Stephen Walsh paints a vivid picture of Parisian artistic politics in the twenties from which emerges one of the richest and most suggestive works of art of modern times.
Inbunden, Engelska, 2013
325 kr
Skickas
The extraordinary group of Russian composers who came together in St Petersburg in the 1860s - long known as 'The Mighty Handful', but, as the moguchaya kuchka, better translated as 'the great little heap' - gave rise to one of the most fascinating and colourful stories in all musical history. Stephen Walsh, author of a major biography of their direct successor, Stravinsky, has written an absorbing account of Musorgsky and his circle - Borodin, Cui, Balakirev and Rimsky-Korsakov. With little or no musical education they created works of lasting significance - Musorgsky's Boris Godunov, Borodin's Prince Igor and Rimsky-Korsakov's Sheherazade. Written with deep understanding and panache, The Kuchka, is highly engaging and a significant contribution to cultural history.
E-bok
Engelska, 2013251 kr
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The extraordinary group of Russian composers who came together in St Petersburg in the 1860s - long known as 'The Mighty Handful', but, as the moguchaya kuchka, better translated as 'the great little heap' - gave rise to one of the most fascinating and colourful stories in all musical history. Stephen Walsh, author of a major biography of their direct successor, Stravinsky, has written an absorbing account of Musorgsky and his circle - Borodin, Cui, Balakirev and Rimsky-Korsakov. With little or no musical education they created works of lasting significance - Musorgsky's Boris Godunov, Borodin's Prince Igor and Rimsky-Korsakov's Sheherazade. Written with deep understanding and panache, The Kuchka, is highly engaging and a significant contribution to cultural history.
E-bok
Engelska, 2018199 kr
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Debussy's life is of extraordinary interest because, like Wagner and Stravinsky, he crossed artistic boundaries, associating as much with poets and artists as with musicians. His father was active in the 1871 Paris Commune and the composer's childhood was thus unsettled, his musical preparation erratic, and his subsequent lifestyle somewhat bohemian by the bourgeois norms of the French musical establishment. He never went to a proper school, but was enough of a pianist to enter the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 10. Whilst still a student he rebelled against the academy-taught "rules of composition" and constructed a language of his own, in constant rebellion against the heavy Wagnerian influence prevalent at that time.In the early 1900s he worked in Paris as a music critic. His own music during these years includes some of the greatest and most influential works of the early twentieth century: the opera Pelléas et Mélisande, his orchestral masterpieces La Mer and Images, a series of profoundly original piano works (including two books of Préludes), and the ballet Jeux, premiered in Diaghilev's 1913 season just before Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (which Debussy attended). His later years were plagued by the rectal cancer that eventually killed him in 1918. But he continued to compose until 1917This was a period of political and cultural turmoil in French life, the Franco-Prussian war and its aftermath, the Dreyfus affair with its religious and military undercurrents, the general instability of the Third Republic, and the First World War. Stephen Walsh's study combines chronological biography with a contextualised picture placing Debussy in the broad artistic and social environment of turn-of-the-century France, making this a significant contribution to the cultural history of the time.
Inbunden, Engelska, 2022
262 kr
Skickas
Everyone loves romantic music: the sweet melody of a Schubert song, the heroine dying for love in an Italian opera, the swooning orchestration of a Tchaikovsky symphony. But as Stephen Walsh - author of the highly praised Debussy: A Painter in Sound - points out in this intensely absorbing study, there is infinitely more to romantic music than meets the eye. The Beloved Vision amounts to a complete, entertaining and singularly readable account of the whole phase in music history that has become the mainstay of the twentieth and twenty-first century concert and operatic repertoire, with some little help from earlier times.The narrative begins in the eighteenth century, with C.P.E. Bach, Haydn and the literary movement known as Sturm und Drang, seen as a reaction of the individual artist to the confident certainties of the Enlightenment. The windows are flung open, and everything to do with style, form, even technique, is exposed to the emotional and intellectual weather, the impulses and preferences of the individual composer. Risk taking - the braving of the unknown - was certainly an important part of what the composers wanted to do, as true of Chopin and Verdi as it is of Berlioz and Wagner. It's an exciting, colourful, story, told with passion but also with the precision and clarity of detail for which this author is so widely admired.
E-bok
Engelska, 2022192 kr
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Everyone loves romantic music: the sweet melody of a Schubert song, the heroine dying for love in an Italian opera, the swooning orchestration of a Tchaikovsky symphony. But as Stephen Walsh - author of the highly praised Debussy: A Painter in Sound - points out in this intensely absorbing study, there is infinitely more to romantic music than meets the eye. The Beloved Vision amounts to a complete, entertaining and singularly readable account of the whole phase in music history that has become the mainstay of the twentieth and twenty-first century concert and operatic repertoire, with some little help from earlier times.The narrative begins in the eighteenth century, with C.P.E. Bach, Haydn and the literary movement known as Sturm und Drang, seen as a reaction of the individual artist to the confident certainties of the Enlightenment. The windows are flung open, and everything to do with style, form, even technique, is exposed to the emotional and intellectual weather, the impulses and preferences of the individual composer. Risk taking - the braving of the unknown - was certainly an important part of what the composers wanted to do, as true of Chopin and Verdi as it is of Berlioz and Wagner. It's an exciting, colourful, story, told with passion but also with the precision and clarity of detail for which this author is so widely admired.
E-bok
Engelska, 2020218 kr
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Häftad, Engelska, 2007
334 kr
Skickas
In 1934, Igor Stravinsky was fifty-two, a Russian expatriate living in Paris and already regarded by many as the most important composer of his generation. Stravinsky: The Second Exile follows him through the remainder of his long life, which he would spend largely in the United States. These are the years during which he would compose such masterworks as The Rake's Progress and Symphony in C, and achieve a new level of fame as a conductor and concert pianist in his own right. In this second and final volume of Stephen Walsh's acclaimed biography, the author traces and illuminates Stravinsky's increasingly complex and often agonised family life and his crucially important relationship with his associate Robert Craft. As a musicologist and critic, Walsh is able to speak with authority and wit not only about Stravinsky's life, but also about his work, expertly following the composer's musical journey from the neoclassicism of his late French and early American periods, through his early essays in serial technique, and on finally to the astonishing complexities of this protean genius's final works. Based on exhaustive research, Stephen Walsh uncovers new and controversial material, making this the second volume of the most definitive biography of the most significant and influential composer of the twentieth century.
E-bok
Engelska, 2011215 kr
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In 1934, Igor Stravinsky was fifty-two, a Russian expatriate living in Paris and already regarded by many as the most important composer of his generation. Stravinsky: The Second Exile follows him through the remainder of his long life, which he would spend largely in the United States. These are the years during which he would compose such masterworks as The Rake's Progress and Symphony in C, and achieve a new level of fame as a conductor and concert pianist in his own right. In this second and final volume of Stephen Walsh's acclaimed biography, the author traces and illuminates Stravinsky's increasingly complex and often agonised family life and his crucially important relationship with his associate Robert Craft. As a musicologist and critic, Walsh is able to speak with authority and wit not only about Stravinsky's life, but also about his work, expertly following the composer's musical journey from the neoclassicism of his late French and early American periods, through his early essays in serial technique, and on finally to the astonishing complexities of this protean genius's final works. Based on exhaustive research, Stephen Walsh uncovers new and controversial material, making this the second volume of the most definitive biography of the most significant and influential composer of the twentieth century.
E-bok
Engelska, 2021166 kr
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"Great, beautiful little studies of unspoken fear and longing and love, told with a sure-footed delicacy rare in a debut" Sarah Moss, Irish Times"An exciting, original, and very welcome new voice" Donal Ryan"These are startling, adventurous and often wonderful stories. I loved this collection" Roddy DoyleA sharp and insightful debut short story collection about the pitfalls of ordinary life A wife yearns to escape the tight-fisted confines of a package holiday. A boy dreams of footballing greatness as his mother mourns a loss. A man tries to assemble an absent child's playhouse, with impossible instructions and too much beer. A woman seeks clarity from automated voices. A father is distracted from Christmas tree shopping with his son by the looming pressure of quarterly sales targets.Shine/Variance captures the tiny crises and wonders of daily life with warmth, wit and decisive clarity. Ordinary people - commuters, call centre workers, children and parents - struggle for stability while craving more, and the schism between expectation and reality is only rarely bridged. Yet, amidst the faltering, recognition and bright moments of hope still illuminate their days.Fresh, tender and darkly funny, these stories are a window into the longings, frustrations and painfully human connections of ordinary life from a remarkable new voice in fiction."The most powerful new collection I've read in some years" John Boyne"Brilliantly bats, staggeringly compelling, and ferociously funny. Stephen Walsh rips the concreteness of reality straight from us and reflects back a more wobbly version of our turbulent lives... Completely unique" June Caldwell"Full of assured originality and freshness - a new writer much to be welcomed" Bernard MacLaverty
E-bok
Engelska, 2018171 kr
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A beautifully written and original biography of one of the greatest and most popular modern composers--which also deeply investigates his much-loved music.Claude Debussy (1862-1918) was that rare creature, a composer who reinvented the language of music without alienating the majority of music lovers. The creator of such classics as La Mer and Clair de Lune, of Pelleas et Melisande and his magnificent, delicate piano works, he is the modernist everybody loves, the man who drove French music into entirely new regions of beauty and excitement at a time when old traditions--and the overbearing influence of Wagner--threatened to stifle it. As a central figure in the birth-years of modernism, Debussy''s influence on French culture was profound. Yet at the same time his own life was complicated and often troubled by struggles over money, women, and ill-health. Walsh''s engagingly original approach is to enrich a lively account of this life with brilliant analyses of Debussy''s music: from his first daring breaks with the rules as a Conservatoire student to his mature achievements as the greatest French composer of his time. The Washington Post called Stephen Walsh''s Stravinsky "one of the best books ever written about a composer." Debussy is a worthy successor.
E-bok
Engelska, 201275 kr
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This revised and updated edition of Voices of the Old Firm tells the story of Rangers and Celtic in the words of those who can say 'I was there'. By interviewing players, managers but above all supporters of the two great clubs, Stephen Walsh has built up a unique portrait of sixty years of football in the city.Full of evocative social and historical detail, the book surveys all the great moments since the war - the ups and downs, the triumphs and disasters. What was it like to be in Lisbon for Celtic's epic 1967 European Cup victory, or in Barcelona for Rangers' European triumph of 1972? The different 'voices' which describe these and many other key events include some of the greatest players ever to pull on a green or a blue jersey and they have vivid tales to tell of encounters on the field.But the book also hears the voices of those who have spent their time standing on the terraces or sitting in the stands cheering on their heroes. Ordinary supporters tell of their adventures at home and abroad while following their clubs with sometimes ridiculous levels of devotion. In their own words, they tell of great games of football, but they also describe the fabric of the fan's life - the buses, the songs, the drink, the clothes, the bigotry and the passionate emotion which marks Glasgow out from almost all other footballing cities.This classic oral history has been brought fully up to date with the addition of new material reflecting the way the teams have come to dominate the Scottish football scene in the last ten years. Highlights include Celtic's pilgrimage to Seville for the UEFA Cup final and Rangers' unforgettable championship win of 2005.
Häftad, Engelska, 2021
185 kr
Skickas
"Great, beautiful little studies of unspoken fear and longing and love, told with a sure-footed delicacy rare in a debut" Sarah Moss, Irish Times"An exciting, original, and very welcome new voice" Donal Ryan"These are startling, adventurous and often wonderful stories. I loved this collection" Roddy DoyleA sharp and insightful debut short story collection about the pitfalls of ordinary life A wife yearns to escape the tight-fisted confines of a package holiday. A boy dreams of footballing greatness as his mother mourns a loss. A man tries to assemble an absent child's playhouse, with impossible instructions and too much beer. A woman seeks clarity from automated voices. A father is distracted from Christmas tree shopping with his son by the looming pressure of quarterly sales targets.Shine/Variance captures the tiny crises and wonders of daily life with warmth, wit and decisive clarity. Ordinary people - commuters, call centre workers, children and parents - struggle for stability while craving more, and the schism between expectation and reality is only rarely bridged. Yet, amidst the faltering, recognition and bright moments of hope still illuminate their days.Fresh, tender and darkly funny, these stories are a window into the longings, frustrations and painfully human connections of ordinary life from a remarkable new voice in fiction."The most powerful new collection I've read in some years" John Boyne"Brilliantly bats, staggeringly compelling, and ferociously funny. Stephen Walsh rips the concreteness of reality straight from us and reflects back a more wobbly version of our turbulent lives... Completely unique" June Caldwell"Full of assured originality and freshness - a new writer much to be welcomed" Bernard MacLaverty
Inbunden, Engelska, 2023
483 kr
Skickas
The story of the legendary comedian Tony Hancock in words, pictures, and not without a few interruptions from The Lad Himself, who proves a little infuriated at how his story is told... as those who know and love his work would fully expect!When he appeared on radio and television in the 1950s, Hancock immediately became an archetype and so he has remained. The writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson basically invented the sitcom form for him, teasing out the threads of his personality and creating from them a universally recognisable figure: the ever-aspiring, grumpy, petty, frustrated everyman pitted against society, bureaucracy, jobsworth vindictiveness and whatever you're having yourself; the best and worst of all of us, down to his last shilling for the meter.WC Fields, Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton and Sid Field all came before him. Young Hancock was hugely influenced by them all, just as successive generations of comic actors (Cleese, Fry and Merton, to name a few) have been massively influenced by Hancock. The Office, Black Books, Peep Show and all the other great British sitcoms of the present day are variations on the Hancock template.The Lad Himself is the creation of writer Stephen Walsh and artist Keith Page, exploring the strange life of a much-admired comedian.