Böcker av 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"--

Franz Schubert's Winterreise is at the same time one of the most powerful and one of the most enigmatic masterpieces in Western culture. In his new book, Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession, Ian Bostridge - one of the work's finest interpreters - focusses on the context, resonance and personal significance of a work which is possibly the greatest landmark in the history of Lieder. Drawing equally on his vast experience of performing this work (he has performed it more than a hundred times), on his musical knowledge and on his training as a scholar, Bostridge unpicks the enigmas and subtle meaning of each of the twenty-four songs to explore for us the world Schubert inhabited, bringing the work and its world alive for connoisseurs and new listeners alike. Originally intended to be sung to an intimate gathering, performances of Winterreise now pack the greatest concert halls around the world. Though not strictly a biography of Schubert, Schubert's Winter Journey succeeds in offering an unparalleled insight into the mind and work of the great composer. 'Usually great singers cannot explain what they do. Ian Bostridge can. Whether or not you know Schubert's 'Winter Journey', the book is gripping because it explains, in probing, simple words, how a doomed love is transformed into art.' Richard Sennett

Ian Bostridge is one of the outstanding singers of our time, celebrated for the quality of his voice but also for the exceptional intelligence he brings to bear on the interpretation of the repertoire of the past and present alike. Yet his early career was that of a professional historian, and A Singer's Notebook takes a look at the multifaceted world of classical music through the eyes of someone whose career as a singer has followed a unique trajectory. Consisting of short essays and reviews written since 1997, some in diary form, it ranges widely over issues serious (music and transcendence) and not so serious (the singer's battles with phlegm), while inevitably discussing many of the composers with whom Bostridge has become identified, such as Benjamin Britten, Henze, Janacek, Weill, Wolf, and Schubert, composer of the Winterreise with which Bostridge has become so associated.Ultimately it returns to the theme of his earlier work on seventeenth century witchcraft - what place can there be for the ineffable in a world defined by an iron cage of rationality?Including a foreword by the eminent sociologist, Richard Sennett, A Singer's Notebook is an intriguing glimpse into the mind and motivation of one of Britain's best loved musicians.