Roger Curtis wrote:

>...  Can anyone else recommend any other novels with a classical music
>background?

I would like to recommend the hallucinating novel "The Unconsoled" by
Kazuo Ishiguro.  I won't even try to begin to tell you something about
it except that the protagonist is a pianist who is going to play an
important concert somewhere in what one may assume would be Middle-Europe.
It's one of the most disconcerting and intriguing books I ever read.  If
you need a reference names like Borges and Kafka come to mind but that
doesn;t do justice to this original, extraordinary, surrealistic and
dreamlike account of a world where nothing is what it seems (which in
itself goes for every book by Ishiguro but is heretaken to extremes).
Highly recommended!

Philip