Altri libri che potrebbero interessarti

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  Disney

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  Growing Up Stories brings together beloved Disney characters and a ton of fun, providing a new way to teach kids about positive traits. These simple stories highlight social-emotional skills like bravery, responsibility, and honesty, making it easy for young ones to grasp these important lessons.   It's time to put the screen away using the Mimi mouse.

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  Aretha Franklin's Amazing Grace

  Aaron Cohen

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  This is a fascinating and thoroughly researched exploration of the best-selling gospel album of all time. For two days in January 1972, Aretha Franklin sang at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles while tape recorders and film cameras rolled. Everyone there knew the event had the potential to be historic: five years after ascending to soul royalty and commercial success, Franklin was publicly returning to her religious roots. Her influential minister father stood by her on the pulpit. Her mentor, Clara Ward, sat in the pews. Franklin responded to the occasion with the performance of her life and the resulting double album became a multi-million seller - even without any trademark hit singles. But that was just one part of the story. Franklin's warm inimitable voice, virtuoso jazz-soul instrumental group and Rev. James Cleveland's inventive choral arrangements transformed the course of gospel. Through new interviews, musical and theological analyses as well as archival discoveries, this book sets the scene, traces the recording's traditional origins and pop infusions and describes the album's enduring impact.

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  The Portraitist - Frans Hals and...

  Steven M. Nadler

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  A biography of the great portraitist Frans Hals that takes the listener into the turbulent world of the Dutch Golden Age. 
   
   
   
  Frans Hals was one of the greatest portrait painters in history, and his style transformed ideas and expectations about what portraiture can do and what a painting should look like. 
   
   
    
  Hals was a member of the great trifecta of Dutch Baroque painters alongside Rembrandt and Vermeer, and he was the portraitist of choice for entrepreneurs, merchants, professionals, theologians, intellectuals, militiamen, and even his fellow artists in the Dutch Golden Age. His works, with their visible brush strokes and bold execution, lacked the fine detail and smooth finish common among his peers, and some dismissed his works as sloppy. But for others, they were fresh and exciting, filled with a sense of the sitter's animated presence captured with energy and immediacy. 
   
   
    
  Steven Nadler gives us the first full-length biography of Hals in many years and offers a view into seventeenth-century Haarlem and this culturally rich era of the Dutch Republic. He tells the story not only of Hals's life, but also of the artistic, social, political, and religious worlds in which he lived and worked.

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  Reading Elgar�s The Music Makers

  David Young

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  Elgar�s The Music Makers, for contralto solo, choir and large orchestra, has experienced a chequered reputation since its 1912 premiere at the Birmingham Festival. The work faced significant adverse criticism which re-emerged over time. Criticism targeted the poem Elgar chose for his setting � Arthur O�Shaughnessy�s ode, whose reputation was later tarnished by T.S. Eliot�s infamous critique �What is Minor Poetry?�. Misunderstanding of Elgar�s innovatory compositional procedure was another main reason behind the negative responses. Elgar integrated the poetic language with musical self-borrowings, transforming the words and offering perceptive listeners enhanced emotion at the highest artistic level. All aspects of Elgar�s musical language combine to produce one of his greatest, yet least understood, masterworks.
  
  Reading Elgar�s The Music Makers brings to the fore a prime example of how first musical performances can be misunderstood and reception can shift over time. The work remains as relevant today as ever. The book�s multi-faceted approach will be invaluable not only for conductors, singers and music students, but for concert goers and music lovers generally.

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  The Beggar's Opera

  John Gay

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  The Beggar's Opera by John Gay is a groundbreaking ballad opera that blends music, satire, and drama to create a sharp and entertaining critique of social corruption, crime, and politics in eighteenth-century England. First performed in 1728, the work revolutionized theatrical tradition by combining spoken dialogue with popular songs, offering audiences a witty and accessible form of musical storytelling.
  
  At the center of the narrative is a world where thieves, criminals, and figures of authority exist in a morally ambiguous society. The play follows the exploits of characters such as the notorious highwayman Macheath, whose romantic entanglements and criminal dealings expose the blurred lines between respectability and criminality. Through a series of betrayals, schemes, and ironic reversals, the story reveals the hypocrisy and corruption present in both high society and the underworld.
  
  One of the play's most striking features is its use of familiar tunes with new satirical lyrics, allowing audiences to engage with its critique through humor and music. This innovative structure enhances its commentary on justice, wealth, and power, suggesting that criminal behavior and elite corruption often mirror one another more closely than expected.
  
  Gay's writing is both playful and incisive, using humor to expose deeper societal issues. The characters are drawn with a mix of caricature and realism, making them both entertaining and symbolic of broader social forces. The result is a work that is as thought-provoking as it is enjoyable.
  
  The Beggar's Opera remains a landmark in the history of musical theatre and satire, celebrated for its originality, cultural impact, and enduring relevance. It continues to resonate as a bold exploration of morality, justice, and the performative nature of social order.

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  On the Subject of Fallen Things

  James Kearns

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  "you start every new day with an inventory: a moth, a cape, a parachute, a coffin, a gun, the wall you built to mount the gun."
  On the Subject of Fallen Things is an addictive, Chekhovian metanarrative: phenomenological, absurd, and dripping with black humour. James Kearns' speaker keeps company with Lazarus, an inept psychic, and a deceased superhero, but finds himself increasingly alone—lost in dialogue with mortality, both personal and anthropological. Permanence, culpability, the function and corruption of human storytelling: all come into play in a surge of momentum that grips the reader, even as it breaks apart: a lean explosion, a gunshot in the distance.
  "On the Subject of Fallen Things weaves whimsy into narrative epiphanies that you never see coming. Each line aggregating weight like the lightness of snowflakes gathering into an avalanche. Hugely enjoyable. Get it now." Roger Robinson, A Portable Paradise, Winner of the 2019 T.S. Eliot Prize
  "This is a really brilliant sequence of poems. Like Ponge, or Herbert, or Steger, or Simic, it manages to be both serious and fleeting, weighty and funny. It's hopeful, actually." S.J. Fowler, 3:AM Magazine

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