Bøger af Ian Bostridge

An exceptionally thought-provoking look at music and identity from one of the world's leading singers.

"In this collection of three essays, internationally renowned tenor Ian Bostridge explores his relation to the performance of Western classical vocal music through the lens of gender, politics, or the ultimate paradoxical grounding of identity, death. As a performer who needs to negotiate between his own identity and that of the musical text he delivers on stage or in the concert hall, Bostridge asks questions about how the complex identity of a piece of music was creatively configured by composers at particular historical moments, and how today's performers can embody that complexity for their audiences. In lucid and compelling prose, Bostridge guides his readers through an exploration of the fluidity of gender roles in music by Monteverdi, Schumann, and Britten, the questioning of colonial power and hierarchy in Ravel's Songs of Madagascar, and Britten's reckoning with death in works from the War Requiem to his final opera, Death in Venice. As readers become privy to Bostridge's lines of inquiry into the music he performs, they are also primed for the searching intensity of his interpretations, in which the uncanny melding of song and self brings about moments of epiphany for both the singer and his audience"--

An exploration of the world's most famous and challenging song cycle, Schubert's Winter Journey (Winterreise), by a leading interpreter of the work, who teases out the themesliterary, historical, psychologicalthat weave through the twenty-four songs that make up this legendary masterpiece.Completed in the last months of the young Schubert's life, Winterreise has come to be considered the single greatest piece of music in the history of Lieder. Deceptively laconicthese twenty-four short poems set to music for voice and piano are performed uninterrupted in little more than an hourit nonetheless has an emotional depth and power that no music of its kind has ever equaled. A young man, rejected by his beloved, leaves the house where he has been living and walks out into snow and darkness. As he wanders away from the village and into the empty countryside, he experiences a cascade of emotionsloss, grief, anger, and acute loneliness, shot through with only fleeting moments of hopeuntil the landscape he inhabits becomes one of alienation and despair. Originally intended to be sung to an intimate gathering, performances of Winterreise now pack the greatest concert halls around the world.Drawing equally on his vast experience performing this work (he has sung it more than one hundred times), on his musical knowledge, and on his training as a scholar, Bostridge teases out the enigmas and subtle meanings of each of the twenty-four lyrics to explore for us the world Schubert inhabited, his biography and psychological makeup, the historical and political pressures within which he became one of the world's greatest composers, and the continuing resonances and affinities that our ears still detect today, making Schubert's wanderer our mirror.