Classical Composers

This guide provides introductory and closing commentary for works from many famous classical composers, and includes time-stamped commentary to explain the technical aspects of what is being heard in the piece and the composer's intent in real time. This innovative audiobook enables you to hear both the music and the commentary in parallel.

Described variously as a 'polymath', a 'renaissance man' and 'one of the most colourful characters in the music business', Mike Batt has led an extraordinarily vibrant and challenging life that has been full of both glorious victories and bitter failures. For better or for worse, he is a man who has always lived life on his own terms. Idiosyncratic but mainstream, complicated but compassionate, steadfastly maverick in spirit but avowedly commercial in outlook. He is a man of great contradictions, but even greater talent.

In 1959, Nancy’s life changes dramatically when her family moves to a new town, Stevenage. Now there is room for a piano, Nancy loses herself in an imagined past of Mozart’s lesser known sister, while making unexpected discoveries of her own inscrutable mother’s history. In 1989 the piano becomes a fixture in a women’s community centre in the town, in a time of personal strife for Martha and her friends. The politics of the era threaten the existence of the centre, and the future of this group of women. A troubled young man buys the piano in 1997 and places it in his sparse flat at ...

Steven Patrick Morrissey was born in Manchester on May 22nd 1959. Singer-songwriter and co-founder of the Smiths (1982-1987), Morrissey has been a solo artist for twenty-six years, during which time he has had three number 1 albums in England in three different decades.Achieving eleven Top 10 albums (plus nine with the Smiths), his songs have been recorded by David Bowie, Nancy Sinatra, Marianne Faithfull, Chrissie Hynde, Thelma Houston, My Chemical Romance and Christy Moore, amongst others.

The movie L’Odeur de la papaye verte in English Scent of Green Papaya of Trân Anh Hung who directed it and wrote also its script is in Vietnamese. This movie of the 1990s is about the Vietnam of the 1950s. Tran Anh Hung distinguishes himself quite a bit by playing his movie in Vietnamese and presenting it to a French and international audience. Some interesting linguistic homonyms come to be revealed to the non-Vietnamese speaker, as for example the similarity between the name of the papaya in Vietnamese which is “Miù” and the proper noun of the main character of the girl “Miù”...

In 1969, a twenty-something screenwriter with one movie credit to his name is approached by Jimi Hendrix's management after the legendary guitarist saw the obscure indie film in London and wanted to collaborate on a project of his own. Jonathan Stathakis had no idea how thrilling the next eighteen months would be, as he and Hendrix formed not just a working partnership but a unique friendship.

To appreciate the beauty of great works of music, we must be familiar with the lives of the geniuses who composed them. For in the personalities and life-stories of great composers is the key to their masterpieces.

"Wonderful compilation" -- Henry Fogel, Dean, Chicago College of Performing Arts, Roosevelt University; former president, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, American Symphony Orchestra League "An enjoyable read, and a great conversation starter." -- James McCarthy, Limelight magazine, Australia "...for those seeking to shake up their listening habits and explore musical rarities -- Opera America A sequel, volume two. Some 90 composers profiled. Special chapter by pianist, conductor, Sir Andras Schiff. The author writes: I will let you in on a little secret. The classical world is prejudiced. If ...

Ruth Padel's new sequence of poems, in four movements, is a personal voyage through the life and legend of one of the world's greatest composers. She uncovers the man behind the music, charting his private thoughts and feelings through letters, diaries, sketchbooks, and the conversation books he used as his hearing declined. She gives us Beethoven as a battered four-year-old, weeping at the clavier; the young virtuoso pianist agonized by his encroaching deafness; the passionate, heartbroken lover. Padel's quest takes her into the heart of Europe and back to her own musical childhood.

The Music Man stands as one of the greatest achievements in American musical theatre, but few know about its rocky beginnings and the against-all-odds success story of its creator, Meredith Willson. Mark Cabaniss steps back into the Golden Age of Broadway and brings to life the origins of this classic show, the music behind it, and the unlikely story of its creator. Interweaving behind-the-scenes accounts of people who worked with Willson, Cabaniss looks at his long and unusual career as a composer, conductor, radio personality, and flutist.

Set against the music we know and love, Mozart, Beethoven, and many more come alive through their correspondence. Poignant, funny, revealing, informative and so often direct and honest, these letters offer a fascinating insight into the personalities that created our Western musical tradition.

"Wonderful compilation" -- Henry Fogel, Dean, Chicago College of Performing Arts, Roosevelt University; former president, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, American Symphony Orchestra League "An enjoyable read, and a great conversation starter." -- James McCarthy, Limelight magazine, Australia "...for those seeking to shake up their listening habits and explore musical rarities -- Opera America A sequel, volume three. Some 90 composers profiled. Provides answers to questions like those found in the Obscure Composers 3 Quiz: 1. After his passing, some of his compositions were found as wrappings ...

At thirteen years old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who had captured the hearts of northern Europe, but his father Leopold was now determined to conquer Italy. Together, they made three visits there the last when Mozart was seventeen, all vividly recounted here by acclaimed conductor Jane Glover. Father and son travelled from the theatres and concert salons of Milan to the church-filled streets of Rome to Naples, poorer and more dangerous than the prosperous north, and to Venice, the carnivelesque birthplace of public opera.

Roger Keith "Syd" Barrett (January 6, 1946 to July 7, 2006) was an English singer, songwriter, guitarist and co-founder of Pink Floyd. He was the band's frontman and primary songwriter for their debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967), and portions of their second album, A Saucerful of Secrets (1968). In April 1968, Barrett was ousted from Pink Floyd amid speculation of mental illness and his use of psychedelic drugs. In 1972, Barrett retired from public life and guarded his privacy until his death of pancreatic cancer in 2006. The following is from an August 1967 interview.

Nelson Mandela's Favorite African Folktales is an audiobook benefiting children orphaned and impacted by HIV/AIDS in South Africa.

Two-and-a-half centuries after his death, the complex life of composer Johann Sebastian Bach continues to fascinate. Bach's colorful life was anchored in his belief that "music has been ordered by God's Spirit"?so much so that he began each composition by scrawling Jesu, juva (Jesus, help me) at the top of a blank page and concluded each with S.D.G. (short for Soli Deo Gloria, to God alone be the glory). Through the eyes of noted music and culture writer Rick Marschall, the intensely personal yet boldly public faith that earned Bach the nickname "The Fifth Evangelist" takes on fresh meaning.

The unresolved and ambiguous details of Robert Schumann’s psychological decline and death have tended to dominate his biography. Yet in his time Schumann was lauded as a protean Romantic literary genius whose writings, as a music critic, poet, novelist and dramatist, eclipsed his musical creativity. How did Schumann reconcile these elements? Does his music suggest he suffered from bipolar disorder? How did his pianist wife, Clara, influence his compositions?

Wide-ranging yet intimate, The Lives of Isaac Stern is a portrait of an artist and statesman who began as an American dreamer and left a lasting inheritance to his art, profession, and the world.

Entre las dos grandes guerras mundiales se originaron varios movimientos de vanguardia en el arte, incluso en la música, que, al poco de nacer, iban acompañados ya de una posvanguardia; ello explica la diversidad de estilos que configuran la mayoría de las décadas del siglo XX. Un compositor ruso, cuya extensa obra es síntesis del romanticismo e impresionismo, abrió vías hacia el vanguardismo.

Much like The Stories Behind The Best-Loved Songs Of Christmas, The Stories Behind The Great Traditions of Christmas and More Stories Behind The Best Loved Songs of Christmas this new Collins Christmas book will fill a void in the book world.