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Welcome to the artissimo.gr pages of Books ! 
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English Language : Classical Music : Books : Books in English Robert Levine - The Story of the Orchestra |
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IN GENERAL Writer : Robert Levine - Artwork by Meredith Hamilton - Year : 2001 - Edition : Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, Inc. - Pages : 96. INTRODUCTION 
This book has mainly been written with the classical music beginners in mind. In first, the conversation is about composers - basically those who did write their best for the orchestra - and, then, about the orchestra members themselves : that is to say, the musical instruments ! The material is given in a simple, comprehensive way, full of musical examples and humorous cartoon-like images, ideal for children ready to make their first voyage in the magical world of classical music. CONTENT In the first part, all important composers are mentioned, with those who are mostly related with well-known orchestral compositions given more space than the others. The eras covered are the baroque, the classical, the romantic, and the modern, and composers are presented in a neither too detailed nor simplistic manner. The material is interesting and is rather whetting one's appetite for even more. An amateur will undoubtedly find the whole set of articles very helpful and attractive. Then, there is the part covering the orchestra instruments : here the quality is very high as well, with almost all contemporary instruments covered, and technical details alternating with valuable musical remarks. It is for sure that an ambitious reader will instantly start processing this information quantity and quality for his own curiosity and musical reasons. Needless to say that 37 well-chosen musical examples (the whole duration of them being approximately 65 minutes - by Naxos Music - with a very good quality of both execution and recording) are keeping reader interested - if not entranced - in the material for a long-long time. For information about all of the pictures included in the project, just read the following paragraph ! STYLE You may have noticed that the artwork creator is mentioned just after the writer's name. This is not a coincidence : the work made by the writer, Robert Levine, is very-very good, but, the overall artwork by Meredith Hamilton is just fantastic ! Speaking in personal, I have never seen such a wealth of happy colours, and a variety of cartoon-like images, others trying to imitate a photo (eg. in the composer section), others giving a nice sense of implicit humour (there are such examples all over the place!) and others simply trying to give a descriptive idea of the object they are supposed to present (instrument mechanisms and the like). However, there are also photographs of the musical instruments enriched with very useful descriptions of their most important parts. The descriptive texts are accompanied by impressive true stories about the composer or the instrument under discussion, while the innumerable photos and images are completing the whole page with an impressive final stroke. The wealth of the musical examples - as already mentioned - is matching perfectly the rich text and the delightful set of images and photos. EVALUATION The combination of the information given, along with all those lovely pictures and the marvellous musical examples are making the book a very attractive choice for all those people who want themselves or their children to start learning a good deal of classical music details, while having at the same time a great-great time ! This book, along with the music CD, are a very good choice indeed ! |
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