Summary
CALL me sad, but I've always loved dictionaries. It's not just the facts they systematically hold: a mind-boggling universe of pithy A to Z definitions peppered with odd nuggets of fascinating information, some of them delightfully useless. The most readable dictionaries echo the personalities of their contributors, and it's even better when a single author has compiled the lot.
The new Penguin Companion to Classical Music, published this week, is such a beast. The author, Paul Griffiths, was chief music critic of the Times for ten years before moving to America in 1992 to write on classical music for the New Yorker and the New York Times. He has published books on Bartk, and more generally on contemporary music. Away from journalism he wrote the libretto for American composer Elliot Carter's 1998 opera What Next?. He's been around the musical block. Even so, researching and writing the book shocked him into realising what he had "spent decades not knowing".See the full content of this document
Extract
A Dance to the Music of Our Times
The new Companion combines authority with gently tempered humour, opinion and curiosity. There's hardly a dry entry in its 900 pages. Sir Adrian Boult was a "British conductor of reticent care and aplomb", not just a grey man in a suit, writes Griffiths . Blind Italian tenor...
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