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Mendelssohn: A Life in Music by R. Larry Todd (Oxford University Press) An extraordinary prodigy of Mozartean abilities, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy was a distinguished composer and conductor, a legendary pianist and organist, and an accomplished painter and classicist. Lionized in his lifetime, he is best remembered today for several staples of the concert hall and for such popular music as "The Wedding March" and "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing." Now, in the first major Mendelssohn biography to appear in decades, R. Larry Todd offers a remarkably fresh account of this musical giant, based upon painstaking research in autograph manuscripts, correspondence, diaries, and paintings. Rejecting the view of the composer as a craftsman of felicitous but sentimental, saccharine works (termed by one critic "moonlight with sugar water"), Todd reexamines the composer's entire oeuvre, including many unpublished and little known works. Here are engaging analyses of Mendelssohn's distinctive masterpieces--the zestful Octet, puckish Midsummer Night's Dream, haunting Hebrides Overtures, and elegiac Violin Concerto in E minor. Todd describes how the composer excelled in understatement and nuance, in subtle, coloristic orchestrations that lent his scores an undeniable freshness and vividness. He also explores Mendelssohn's changing awareness of his religious heritage, Wagner's virulent anti-Semitic attack on Mendelssohn's music, the composer's complex relationship with his sister Fanny Hensel, herself a child prodigy and prolific composer, his avocation as a painter and draughtsman, and his remarkable, polylingual correspondence with the cultural elite of his time. Mendelssohn: A Life offers a masterful blend of biography and musical analysis. Readers will discover many new facets of the familiar but misunderstood composer and gain new perspectives on one of the most formidable musical geniuses of all time. More

Music Education and the Music Listening Experience by Marian T. Dura (Studies in History and Interpretation of Music, Vol 89: Edwin Mellen Press) The purpose of this book is to examine and characterize the kinesthetic, movement-based aspect of the music listening experience. To this end, I will address the "knowing" that musical sounds produce within the body and the ways in which musical experience becomes somatized and represented as movement. This includes rhythmic responses; inner representations of tension and release, line, and phrase; responses resembling change of location in actual space; muscular reactions imitative of those used in playing or singing; and responses based on the character or mood of a piece of music, insofar as these relate to posture, smoothness or jerkiness of gesture and/or locomotion, speed of movement, placement (high or low) and other kinetic factors. More

Lost in the Stars: The Forgotten Musical Career of Alexander Siloti includes CD recording of Bach-Siloti piano transcriptions played by James Barbagallo by Charles Barber (Scarecrow Press) Siloti's genius lay in re-creation and rediscovery. In purely musical terms, he lived through others. Like great actors animating Chekhov and Shakespeare, Pushkin and Genet, the originality of his voice lay in its own accent and rhythms and weight, its internal pulse and pacing. It lay in recognition of the creative gifts of others: so early did he hear the power of Stravinsky, Scriabin, Rachmaninoff. It lay in a gift for organization and account, making it possible for new voices to be heard well and memorably. And it lay in his genius for sound. The evidence for the beauty of tone he fashioned is overwhelming and irrefutable.  More

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