In Review

09 January 2009 13:06 BST

Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness by Norman Lebrecht

Published by Allen Lane: Penguin Books, out April 5th, hardback, 307 pages, £20.00 rrp.

In a nutshell…

Detailed, amusing in places but waffly.

What's it all about?

Lebrecht takes the reader on a journey through the early days of recording music onto LP records and tapes, describing the death of spontaneous compositions and the new quest for recording perfection before embarking on the continuing journey of recorded music into the 21st century.

He manages to convey the genuine excitement felt during the late 19th century at the idea of being able to create a perfect constant recording of a musician's work and seamlessly links the ongoing quest for perfection into the great Jazz musicians of the pre-war era.

As well as tackling the issue of how rock and roll transformed music and its popularity across the world, Lebrecht assesses the impact of new classical musicians and how the likes of Vanessa Mae and Charlotte Church impacted on the classical world.

Finally, Lebrecht provides the reader with a brief assessment of what he considers to be the best 100 classical music recordings - before revealing the 20 worst.

Who's it by?

Lebrecht is probably best known for his musings as Assistant Editor for The Evening Standard following a decade as The Daily Telegraph's major music columnist. He also is a presenter for Radio 3's Lebrecht.live show.

Having already written ten books about music, this eleventh volume follows much in the footsteps of its predecessors, including "When the Music Stops", "The Complete Companion to 20th Century Music" and "The Song of Names".

This last achievement was a work of fiction based on his research and won Lebrecht the Whitbread First Novel Award. It told the story of two boys, a genius violinist and a bespectacled swot, growing up during World War II.


As an example…
[Discussing how celebrity led to a collapse within the classical industry…]

"It came about when labels were pushed by corporate owners to chase the popular buck. Decca signed a quartet of girls in bodysuits. EMI embraced a Playboy centrefold. America's foremost cellist went hillbilly. A Welsh warbler gobbled up the promotion budget of Sony Classical, then declared that she was done with the classics. A civilisation was ending."


Likelihood of becoming a Hollywood blockbuster

This will undoubtedly become one of those books all muso-geeks who profess to know everything (and probably do) about the birth and death of all genres of music. Perhaps a television documentary could be wrenched out of this, but its probably best left to the study shelves.

What the others say

"What Norman Lebrecht excels at is anecdote. And it is through anecdote that he tells the story of the classical record industry and what he contentiously describes as its shameful death."

Gerald Levy - IndieLondon

"This is not the use of language which wins a Whitbread first novel of the year award, as Lebrecht did in 2002. Is it that he's slumming, regarding journalism as unimportant? Hardly. It's more likely that he's trapped inside his system of assumptions, condemned to act out the contradictions he claims to analyse by whipping up artificial excitement whether or not he has something to say…"

Adam Mars-Jones - The Guardian

So is it any good?

There is no doubting the fact that Lebrecht is extremely passionate about music and his beliefs within its industry and the anecdotal phrasing often provides a form of light relief against a background of excruciatingly detailed accounts of the ins and outs of the classical world, which can become overwhelming for the novice at times.

Sadly though, the book is somewhat oxymoronic in that he on the one hand says classical music is dead and on the other, talks at great length about how the public still enjoys classical recordings as evidenced by the success of The Three Tenors' recordings.

Indeed, Lebrecht actively enjoys telling the reader that Pavarotti's sales of 100 million records easily outweighs the sales of Led Zepplin's IV, Pink Floyd's The Wall and Michael Jackson's Thriller put together.

Despite these massive sales, almost everybody is to blame for the demise of classical recordings from arrogant musicians writing compositions which the public won't like to the public for not buying the records.

Orchestras are also attacked for charging over the odds and putting off promoters, while those who refused to treat the industry as a business are lambasted almost as much as those who didn't appreciate it for the art form he declared it is.

6.5/10

Charlie Thomas