Music from the road

Since his debut fourteen years ago, Tim Page has established himself as one of our most original and perceptive music critics, and one of the very few to maintain a serious involvement with the music of our own time. Gathering many of Page's liveliest articles and interviews, Music from the Road introduces a remarkable critical sensibility to a wider audience while offering thought-provoking new perspectives on composers, performers, and trends that dominate the current scene.

Page covers a characteristically wide range of topics, from Irving Berlin's complex sweetness to Milton Babbitt's elegant ferocity, from Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg's wild-woman glamour to Mitsuko Uchida's infinitely articulated restraint, from Pavarotti at the Garden to Sweeney Todd in the opera house. Special highlights are two moving profiles of Leonard Bernstein, a revealing survey of musical prodigies, a trenchant discussion of opera fanatics, and Page's famous Piano Quarterly interview with Glenn Gould. Other interviews offer surprising insights into the thought and works of Babbitt, John Gage, and, in a remarkable joint interview, Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Balancing an intimate knowledge of the music with an eternal capacity for being surprised, Page is an ideal guide to the new, the old, and the radically unexpected.