Amadeus Press and Limelight Editions

An excerpt from
Tanglewood: A Group Memoir
By Margaret Daniels
The story of Tanglewood – the summer home of the Boston Symphony since 1935 – as told in first-person accounts by such Tanglewood luminaries as Leonard Bernstein, Serge Koussevitzky, Aaron Copland, Erich Leinsdorf, Phyllis Curtin, Seiji Ozawa, Yo-Yo Ma, Dawn Upshaw, John Harbison, James Levine, and many of the leading musicians, critics, and music professionals who consider Tanglewood a second home. A “documentary” coffee-table book including letters, speeches, interviews, vintage newspaper articles, and a treasure trove of photographs from the BSO's archvies, woven together by a narrative thread and commented on by the author. Among the dozens of stories included: • Student Lenny Bernstein writes the folks back home about “Koussie” and the “Boiks”; ten years later, conductor Leonard Bernstein inspires the students with his own brand of oratory • Boris Goldovsky reminisces about the glory days of the Tanglewood Opera Department where he discovered Leontyne Price, Sherrill Milnes, and an amazing number of soon-to-become-famous young American singers • Gunther Schuller's 1979 Tanglewood manifesto is the talk of the music world • Oliver Knussen relates how Rostopovich told the Shed audience of the death of Shostakovich after conducting the composer's Fifth Symphony • Seiji Ozawa remembers his student trip to Tanglewood on a Bonanza bus with only a few phrases of English at his command and very few dollars in his pocket • The transformation of Tanglewood under the orchestra's new Music Director, James Levine

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An excerpt from
Redeemer Reborn,The: Parsifal as The Fifth Opera of Wagner's Ring
By Paul Schofield
Traditionally Wagnerian scholarship has always treated the Ring and Parsifal as two separate works. Redeemer Reborn: Parsifal as the Fifth Opera of Wagner’s Ring shows how Parsifal is in fact actually the fifth opera of the Ring. Schofield explains in detail how these five musical dramas portray a single, unbroken story which begins at the start of Das Rheingold when Wotan breaks a branch from the World Ash-tree and Alberich steals the gold of the Rhine, thus separating Spear and Grail, and ends with the reunion of the Spear and Grail in the temple of Monsalvat at the end of Parsifal. Schofield explains how and why the four main characters of the Ring are reborn in the opera Parsifal, needing to complete in Parsifal the spiritual journey begun in the Ring. He also shows how the redemption that is not attained in the process of the Ring is finally realized in the events of Parsifal.

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Amadeus Quote of the Day
"The name of a singer is a note in the air: with Caballé an A flat, a high A flat taken softly from the octave below and perfectly placed. She holds it, holds it long, and just as it seems she must stop for breath other voices enter below. And still she holds, as they take up a hypnotic melody, snake-charmed with fascinated repulsion, for in their midst the woman with the beautiful voice is the Borgia, and the note, which we hear inwardly as the sound evoked by the singer's name, is part of the inspired finale to the Prologue of Donizetti's opera."

— J. B. Steane, Singers of the Century, Volume III