For those of you who, like I, love reading novels with a classical music background, here's one I gulped down this weekend. It's really quite extraordinary: Robert Ford: The Student Conductor G. P. Putnam's Sons 5/5 stars A Beautiful First Novel with a Classical Music Background I am particularly drawn to novels that have a background in the world of classical music. I loved Vikram Seth's 'An Equal Music,' for instance, with its main characters who are chamber music players. But I have to say that as much as I admired Seth's book, this one is better. It is not only startlingly apt in its insider's understanding of the world of classical musicians, but also for its complex, thought-provoking plot with its many subtly revealed secrets, and for its burnished language. Author Robert Ford was a flutist and received an MFA from Yale before becoming a writer and actor. He clearly knows from the inside about the insecurities, obsessiveness and search for transcendence so often seen in top-level musicians. He describes those qualities with spare lyricism and telling detail. (Here, for instance, is a passage about the protagonist, a violinist-turned-student-conductor now studying in Germany with a great if mysterious maestro. He has not played his violin in months but picks it up again for a day-long practice session: "Three months without playing had left his chin smooth and vulnerable. He'd been so intent on tuning intervals, one small correction after another, that he'd forgotten the need to work in a callus. He brushed a knuckle just behind the jaw bone and winced. When he looked, there was a mosquito's worth of blood on the back of his finger.") The music of Brahms figures as a leitmotiv throughout this book and it is described in detail that only a musician - and a good writer - could provide. While reading 'The Student Conductor' I kept open my own score of Brahms's Second Symphony for frequent reference, and was astonished to realize how many insights Ford gave me about the work--not something you'd expect a novel to do, is it? I also found myself referring to a couple of books that I am sure Ford used in his preparation for writing the book: Jan Swafford's marvelous biography of Brahms, and Norman Lebrecht's gossipy 'The Maestro Myth.' However the main theme of the book is not the music. It is a love story, of sorts, that takes place against the background of Germany in 1989 when the Wall fell. Not only are there ghosts from the divided Germany--primarily in the character of East German oboist Petra Vogel with whom student conductor Cooper Barrow falls in love--but from the era of Hitler's Germany whose shadow falls on Barrow's conducting teacher, Karlheinz Ziegler. Plot twists bearing on these things make the book compulsively readable. I would recommend this book urgently to readers who have some background in music. But I would also recommend it as well to those who have no such background because Ford has an ability to describe the inner lives of classical musicians in a way that makes it understandable to anyone. Plus, it's a great story. Review at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0399150374/classicalnetA/ Scott Morrison