Choral Masterworks. A Listener's Guide :: Education by Design Store

Editorial Review
Michael Steinberg's highly successful listener's guides--The Symphony and The Concerto--have been universally praised for their blend of captivating biography, crystal clear musical analysis, and delightful humor. Now Steinberg follows these two greatly admired volumes with Choral Masterworks, the only such guide available to this most popular of musical forms.
Here are more than fifty illuminating essays on the classic choral masterworks, ranging from Handel's Messiah, Bach's Mass in B Minor, and Beethoven's Missa solemnis, to works by Haydn, Brahms, Mendelssohn, and many others. Steinberg spans the entire history of classical music, from such giants of the Romantic era as Verdi and Berlioz, to leading modern composers such as Elgar, Rachmaninoff, Vaughan Williams, and Stravinsky, to contemporary masters such as John Adams and Charles Wuorinen. For each piece, Steinberg includes a fascinating biographical account of the work's genesis, often spiced with wonderful asides. The author includes an astute musical analysis of each piece, one that casual music lovers can easily appreciate and that more serious fans will find invaluable. The book also provides basic information such as the various movements of the work, the organization of the chorus and orchestra, and brief historical notes on early performances.
More than twenty million Americans perform regularly in choirs or choruses. Choral Masterworks will appeal not only to concert goers and CD collectors, but also to this vast multitude of choral performers, an especially engaged and active community.
"What sets Steinberg's writing apart is its appealing mixture of impregnable authority (he knows this music) and purely personal asides (by the end of the book, we know this man). Choral Masterworks can be read by anybody, from a professional musician to any young listener newly braced by the stoic pessimism of the Brahms 'German Requiem.'" --Washington Post Book World
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Customer Reviews

Very Good, but far from complete.

2007-03-01
I am giving Mr. Steinberg Four Stars for his good work.

Mr Steinberg says in his introduction that he regrets omissions, but does not intend to apologize for anything he DID include. Well, if I were him I would retract that; as I will show, he makes some inclusions that are hardly earth-shattering.

He omits Berlioz's Te Deum (one of the works he regrets leaving out), yet he includes several of the smaller Brahms works! I'm not anti-Brahms, but why would you leave out a work like the Berlioz Te Deum in the first place? And however interesting it may be, why include the Mozart-Handel Messiah? If Mr. Steinberg had left that out, the smaller Mozart and Brahms, he would have had space to include Berlioz, Bruckner, Poulenc, Monteverdi, and at least one more Haydn mass, the "Nelson".
There are several great settings of the "Gloria" by Antonio Vivaldi which are wonderful. I would have suggested Vivaldi's "Dixit Dominus". Poulenc's "Gloria" is also a work which deserved to be included, as did Dvorak's Requiem...whatever George Bernard Shaw's opinion of it may have been.

One of the most unforgiveable omissions was Monteverdi's "Vespro della Beata Vergine", but of course Mr. Steinberg doesn't apologize for it's omission like he did for obscure Pfitzner, Gerhard and [less obscure] Delius. A work like Monteverdi's Vespers, even though it is a collection of pieces, is now accepted as one of the greatest choral works.

As I see it, to choose the right works for a book like this, what you do is choose ONE work by each major composer until you have all the big guys covered. Then you expand the amount of works by some of them. In Bach's case, obviously the two Passions should be included in addition to the Mass in B minor. In Berlioz's case, you would expand to include the Te Deum....and so on.
In this book, Steinberg includes "Genesis" by Wuorinen, "Lilacs in the Dooryard Bloom'd" by Roger Sessions, and what I think is an excessive amount of Stravinsky: the Requiem Canticles, Symphony of Psalms, Mass, Sacred Canticle, Persephone, and The Wedding.Obviously Stravinsky should be represented, but six works by him, and only one of Haydn's Masses? I understand that Steinberg was pressured by his publisher to keep the length of this volume small, some indiscretions can be forgiven. But this is a VERY unbalanced book in terms of the choices of works to explore.

But enough criticism. Let's go over the real positives of this book. Now, the actual exploring of the pieces is very good. It is very hard to talk/comment on music without being either too technical, or too rhapsodic and reminiscing. Steinberg strikes the balance perfectly. He starts out most often by interesting you with anecdotes, some of them from his own life. When he goes into detail describing the actual music, he is careful to stick to 'regular people language', even still those areas are a bit sticky for the lay listener. He uses notated musical examples often enough, which make this book more than just a regular read for those who know their music theory.

When Mr. Steinberg gets to do an "update" for his book, I expect to see a far wiser inclusion of great works.

(Note just is case Steinberg reads his Amazon reviews: I'm only critisizing you because I like your stuff.)