For People Who Devour Books

Jul 2014

20th Century, 21st Century, Classical Music, Diaries, Music

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Pianino Man

Minimal Efforts

Benjamin by the Sea

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Deconstructing Harry

Harrison Birtwistle: Wild Tracks

By Fiona Maddocks (a conversation diary)

Faber & Faber 318pp £22.50 order from our bookshop

There’s a great Tumblr blog currently doing the rounds called Composers Doing Normal Shit. We see photographs of Dmitri Shostakovich playing snooker; Aaron Copland eating an ice cream; Johannes Brahms having a sad picnic. Fans of the site will love Fiona Maddocks’s new book about birthday boy Harrison Birtwistle (he’s eighty in July).

Conducted at the composer’s kitchen table in Wiltshire over the course of last year, the series of interviews, threaded together to form a diary, are punctuated by a variety of domestic interludes: Birtwistle discussing how to make spaghetti vongole; Birtwistle eating a chocolate egg;