Product Description

Inflated egos. Corporate insanity. Slave labour. Sexual excess. Dazzling genius. Welcome to the world of classical recording. Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness is a sparkling exposé of the strange truth and sheer brilliance behind the classical music recording industry. Leading music critic Norman Lebrecht charts its rise since the great Caruso’s first gramophone bestseller of 1902 and predicts the industry’s imminent doom in the face of schmaltzy crossover albums and new technology. From the imperious Karajan to the perfectionist Toscanini and charismatic Bernstein, the leading figures are all here, depicted in witty, incisive pen portraits. Including Lebrecht’s own selections of 100 recorded masterpieces and twenty that should never have been made, this is a compelling story of flamboyant maestros, lifelong alliances, disastrous personality clashes and entrepreneurial masterstrokes.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #108845 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Review
'Norman Lebrecht is classical music's chief mischief-maker. As full of bombast as a fairground barker, he will print what most would only hint ... [it is] a lickety-spit history of the industry from wax cylinders to MP3s.' --Anna Picard, The Independent on Sunday

About the Author
Norman Lebrecht won the Whitbread First Novel Award for 2003 with The Song of Names. Born in London, Norman Lebrecht is Assistant Editor of the Evening Standard and presenter of lebrecht.live on BBC Radio 3. He has written eleven books about music, translated into 15 languages, and is regarded as one of the foremost cultural commentators of our time.

Customer Reviews

A highly entertaining book about the tragic demise of the classical music recording indusrty
Normal Lebrecht has always been a provocative, well-informed, opinionated and generally stimulating writer. As a long-stending lover of classical music, I found this a very revealing book about the powers behind the classical music recording industry and the reasons for its current demise. Lebrecht is very well informed and cuts straight through all the nonsense, the hype and the dumbing down of the music industry. I very much share his revulsion at the way many young musicians are currently marketed, hyped up, 'managed' and raised sky-high through exaggerated praise only to disappear shortly afterwards, eclipsed by a newer, younger, prettier face. It is also tragic how many honest, gifted and even great performers are silenced, simply because the major recording companies cannot find a way of 'packaging them' in order to sell CDs.

Fortunately, we still have the 'minor' recording companies to thank for venturing into less well-known repertoite, offering honest and unhyped exposure to young musicians and, often, lowering the price at which a music lover can taste and test music that he/she has not known in the past.

Lebrecht's catalogue of 100 of his favourite recordings and 20 the 'should never have been made' is both entertaining and provocative. One can disagree with many of his nominations, but it is interesting to take issue with him. His dismissal and derision of Peter Pears as a Schubert singer verges on the vitriolic - it would have been offensive if one took it out of the context of this book, whose opinionated tone is a pleasure even when one disagrees with it.

An entertaining rogue
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.

Entertaining but not as rigorous as it could be
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!".