Chamber Music: A Listener's Guide

Paperback.
Chamber Music: A Listener's Guide is a collection of essays about the essential masterworks of the chamber music literature, written to be meaningful to non-professional but interested music-lovers while providing enrichment even for committed chamber music enthusiasts. The book covers a core repertoire of pieces for representative instrumental groupings for three or more players that a concertgoer is most likely to encounter in the course of concert-going, focusing on frequently performed works composed from the late Baroque to the present. Many of these essays have appeared as program notes in the printed programs of notable ensembles in the United States and Europe, but some are newly written specifically for this book.
Keller's approach is more historical than analytical. Although the essays draw attention to musical details that make each piece distinctive and admirable, the book steers clear of theoretical jargon that might be off-putting or confusing to the general music-lover. Chamber Music: A Listener's Guide explores the stories behind these compositions: the circumstances of their creation, how they fit into the composer's life and works, how performers have dealt with their specific challenges, how critics and audiences have received them.

From Arensky to Wolf, Chamber Music: A Listener's Guide provides inviting and up-to-date essays on 193 seminal works by 56 composers. Keller's generously scaled program notes offer considerable historical depth while revealing the author's enthusiastic delight in a repertoire that is obviously close to his heart. This book promises to be the essential single-volume concert guide for chamber music lovers in the 21st century.

CONTENIDO:

Juan Crisostomo de Arriaga
Felix Mendelssohn
Frederic Chopin
Robert Schumann
Giuseppe Verdi
Clara Schumann
Cesar Franck
Bedrich Smetana
Anton Bruckner
Carl Reinecke
Johannes Brahms
Alexander Borodin
Camille Saint-Saens
Mac Bruch
Antonin Dvorak
Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky
Edvard Grieg
Gabriel Faure
Vincent D'Indy
Leos Janacek
Ernest Chausson
Edward Elgar
Hugo Wolf
Viktor Ewald
Anton Arensky
Achille-Claude Debussy
Jean Sibelius
Carl Nielsen
Amy Cheney Beach
Max Reger
Sergei Rachmaninoff
Gustav Holst
Arnold Schoenberg
Charles Ives
Maurice Ravel
Fritz Kreisler
Ernst von Dohnanyi
Ernest Bloch
Bela Bartok
Nikolai Miaskovsky
Georges Enesco
Alban Berg
Karol Szymanowski
Joaquin Turina
Zoltan Kodaly
Igor Stravinsky
Anton Webern
Edgard Varese
Heitor Villa-Lobos
Darius Milhaud
Bohuslav Martinu
Jacques Ibert
Sergei Prokofiev
Leo Ornstein
Ervin Schulhoff
Paul Hindemith
Erich Wolfgang Korngold
Silvestre Revueltas
Francis Poulenc
Carlos Chavez
Aaron Copland
Ernst Krenek
Maurice Durufle
Karl Amadeus Hartmann
Dmitri Shostakovich
Olivier Messiaen
Elliott Carter
Samuel Barber
Nino Rota
Benjamin Britten
Alberto Ginastera
Gyorgy Ligetti
Luciano Berio
Morton Feldman
Gyorgy Kurtag
George Crumb
Krzyztof Penderecki
R. Murray Schafer
Alfred Schnittke
Meter Maxwell Davies
Steve Reich
Joan Tower
Joseph Cellli
Paul Schoenfield
Osvaldo Golijov