Overview
“A rapturous, witty, and passionate memoir ... Violin Dreams is not only the story of a man becoming an artist, it’s a history of twentieth-century music.” — John Guare, Tony Award–winning playwright
Arnold Steinhardt, for more than forty years an international soloist and the first violinist of the Guarneri String Quartet, brings warmth, wit, and fascinating insider details to the story of his lifelong obsession with the violin, that most seductive and stunningly beautiful instrument. His story is rich with vivid scenes: the terror inflicted by his early violin teachers, the sensual pleasure involved in the pursuit of the perfect violin, the charged atmosphere of high-level competitions. Steinhardt describes Bach’s Chaconne as the holy grail for the solo violin, and he illuminates, from the perspective of an ardent owner of a great Storioni violin, the history and mysteries of the renowned Italian violinmakers.
Violin Dreams includes a remarkable CD recording of Steinhardt performing Bach’s Partita in D Minor as a young violinist forty years ago and playing the same piece especially for this book. A conversation between the author and Alan Alda on the differences between the two performances is included in the liner notes.
Synopsis
“A rapturous, witty, and passionate memoir ... Violin Dreams is not only the story of a man becoming an artist, it’s a history of twentieth-century music.”—John Guare, Tony Award–winning playwright
Arnold Steinhardt, for more than forty years an international soloist and the first violinist of the Guarneri String Quartet, brings warmth, wit, and fascinating insider details to the story of his lifelong obsession with the violin, that most seductive and stunningly beautiful instrument. His story is rich with vivid scenes: the terror inflicted by his early violin teachers, the sensual pleasure involved in the pursuit of the perfect violin, the charged atmosphere of high-level competitions. Steinhardt describes Bach’s Chaconne as the holy grail for the solo violin, and he illuminates, from the perspective of an ardent owner of a great Storioni violin, the history and mysteries of the renowned Italian violinmakers.
Violin Dreams includes a remarkable CD recording of Steinhardt performing Bach’s Partita in D Minor as a young violinist forty years ago and playing the same piece especially for this book. A conversation between the author and Alan Alda on the differences between the two performances is included in the liner notes.
Publishers Weekly
Steinhardt (Indivisible by Four: A String Quartet in Pursuit of Harmony) turns this memoir about becoming a classical concert performer into an adventure. Beyond the specifics of a lifetime spent learning music (Steinhardt hated to practice but remembers swooning to Beethoven as a six-year-old), the first violinist of the celebrated Guarneri Quartet shapes his story with a series of almost mythical odysseys and visions that parallel his technical and intellectual progress. There is the search for the right teacher and the right violin, as well as quirky impressions of such virtuosos as Heifetz and Swigeti. But above all is Steinhardt's ultimate challenge: interpreting J.S. Bach's Chaconne, the most moving but inscrutable of all violin solos. Throughout, Bach is the standard by which Steinhardt measures himself, the artist whose "interlocking qualities of intelligence and sensitivity" he emulates. He knows Bach's history, deconstructs his music, even dreams about the man. When Steinhardt writes of his own fondness for mountain climbing or playfully labels an 18th-century instrument crafted by Sanctus Seraphim "the violin's answer to a fashion model slender, high-arched, shapely," his subtext is, inevitably, the effect on playing Bach. Watching this accomplished violinist take on the master is riveting; the feeling of immediacy he creates in its telling is an opus at once heroic and brillante. (Oct.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.