Rupert Christiansen
‘Play Better!’
Music as Alchemy: Journeys with Great Conductors and their Orchestras
By Tom Service
Faber & Faber 292pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
During one of her summer holidays in Salzburg, Margaret Thatcher spent a day with Herbert von Karajan. The Prime Minister got on famously with the supremo of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Leading a government and conducting an orchestra confronted them with many of the same daily quandaries. According to Richard Osborne’s biography of Karajan, what Thatcher specifically wanted to know was how a conductor creates a sense of ensemble in an orchestra and then controls it: through force of will or through persuasion?
As indicated by the incorporation of the word ‘alchemy’ in the title of Tom Service’s study of the relationship between six major orchestras and their chief conductors, there are no straight answers to be had here. In fact, with orchestras such as Spira Mirabilis currently proving that with some extra
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Any story about Eden has to be a story about the Fall; unchanging serenity does not make a narrative.'
@suzifeay reviews Jim Crace's 'eden'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/trouble-in-paradise
The first holiday camps had an 'ethos of muscular health as a marker of social respectability, and were alcohol-free. How different from our modern Costa Brava – not to mention the innumerable other coasts around the world now changed forever'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/from-mont-blanc-to-magaluf
'The authorities are able to detain individuals in solitary confinement for up to six months at a secret location', which 'increases the risk to the prisoner of torture'.
@lucyjpop looks at two cases of China's brutal crackdown on free expression.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/xu-zhiyong-thupten-lodoe