Volume 52, Number 16 · October 20, 2005
The Voice of Masters
By Joseph Kerman
Choral Masterworks: A Listener's Guide
by Michael Steinberg
Oxford University Press,321 pp., $30.00
In his recent book Classical Music in America, Joseph Horowitz devotes several chapters to 'Offstage Participants,' his name for people who work away from the footlights and make up the support system of musical life, as he sees it, rather than in the spots as singers, players, or conductors. One from within this group who deserves our thanks, Michael Steinberg, first became known as a music critic for The Boston Globe and has since spent his time more peacefully as a program adviser (or 'artistic adviser') for several major symphony orchestras, a lecturer, and a prolific writer of program notes. They are program notes with a difference, admired for their relaxed manner and elegance as well as their warmth and authority; Steinberg is a man who wears a great deal of learning—learned from books, scores, and especially from wide musical experience—very lightly. He has recently been expanding his program notes and collecting them in books. Choral Masterworks rounds out a trilogy of 'Listener's Guides' with The Symphony and The Concerto. The book covers music from Bach's Passions and the B-Minor Mass to John Adams's Harmonium and Charles Wuorinen's Genesis.
Review, 3420 words
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