Rate this book

Play It Again: An Amateur Against The Impossible (2013)

by Alan Rusbridger(Favorite Author)

4.22 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0374232911 (ISBN13: 9780374232917)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

review 1: Don't often give 5*'s to a book..... This is inspirational. I've been working towards doing a 'performers' for the last 3 years. I've more time to practice & started with technical advantages he's not got & I'm still 'getting there' gradually. OK he's only doing a 10 minute performance (mine's c40 minutes) - but this work is much harder than anything I'm doing. His achievement is really very impressive.....On top of that - there's his analysis of the news stories for the 16 months he's working on the Ballade.....He interviews a number of well known pianists - which prove really insightful...... (& at the end he's put a complete copy of the score, with his notes & other pianists notes......)He also interviews a couple of eminent psychologists about memory.....There's al... moreso his take on the internet & Twitter - anyone know how to set a 'tweet-deck'? 'cos I'd love to know.....!And - on top of all this - is the thread of what the perfect recordings of works are doing to our expectations of everyone who tackles any work. We now expect perfection - but that's necessarily what we should be aiming for.....I'd say, you don't have to be a musician to enjoy this.....PS - am seriously thinking of giving this to one of my longest-standing pupils, when he leaves me in July.....
review 2: As an ex-amateur pianist myself (my piano gathers dust in the spare room), I picked this up when I saw it on a display shelf at the library. Unfortunately, even though the music sounds interesting, the author and I don't think about piano playing in the same terms, so reading his thoughts on learning the piece is not as interesting as I thought it would be. For one thing, he talks a lot about what other people think of the piece. I think about technique and "chunking" among other things, but what other people think of the piece has never been important to me. I play what I like to play, or what I like to hear. Thank goodness musical history wasn't a very big part of theory, or I would never have passed all my music exams back in the day. I know a lot of people like to talk about the history behind each musical piece, however, so I'll chalk it up to personality differences. This book has inspired me to renew my efforts to master Rhapsody in Blue, however, so there's that. (It's on my bucket list.) less

Download links for: Play it Again: An Amateur Against the Impossible

Advertising