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