AFTER GOLDEN AGE: DECL ROMANTIC PIANISM C - Tapa dura

One can make too much of the handing down of great traditions of piano playing, as Kenneth Hamilton demonstrates in one of the best music books to be published in the last twelve months: his erudite, revealing and wittily subversive study of the Liszt-Paderewski years and the rather primmer world we inhabit today. (Richard Osborne, The Oldie)

the most irresistible music book I read this year...scholarly, but hilariously sarcastic (Damian Thompson, The Daily Telegraph, Christmas book choice)

jolly and entertaining...full of wit and interest, and written with passion...a delightful and instructive book (Charles Rosen, Times Literary Supplement)

Hamilton's healthy mixture of common sense, insightful arguments, and considerable experience as both scholar and pianist demonstrate just how far our current notions of performance etiquette, textual fidelity, and audience responsibility can be from those of practitioners a century or more removed. (Jonathan Kregor, Notes)

This is beyond doubt an important, if controversial book, befitting a new century and brilliantly argued (Malcolm Troup, Piano Journal)

After the Golden Age is written in a engaging and entertaining style, and it covers a wealth of material, making a major contribution to the study of performance style. Bluntly, it should be required reading for all piano literature classes, read by all serious students of the piano, and likewise by anyone interested in the ways performance styles and personalities intersect with the literature...[It] will probably retain its relevance for decades. (Jonathan Bellman, Journal of Musicological Research)

a revelatory analysis of musical interpretation... rarely can any new musicological treatise have been so densely crammed with jaw-dropping insights, or so enjoyable a guide to an alien mindset, as this one. (R.J.Stove, The University Bookman)

Since very many people share Kenneth Hamilton's fascination with the piano and its music, his skilful handling of so many sources of information to build up a lively picture of the world of the Romantic pianist will likewise fascinate a wide readership. And what a world that was, as Hamilton describes it! (Peter Williams, The Musical Times)

I hope Hamilton's eminently laudable contribution to the discourse has a seismic impact. His prose reads, for the most part, like silk: fizzing with humour, some timely sarcasm, and written through the perceptive eyes of one pianist evaluating another (David Trippett, 19th Century Music Review)

After the Golden Age is a provocative book in which Hamilton gives a virtuoso performance. (Daniel Gallagher, Ad Parnassum)

Kenneth Hamilton's book engagingly and lucidly dissects the oft-invoked myth of a Great Tradition, or Golden Age of Pianism. It is written both for players and for members of their audiences by a pianist who believes that scholarship and readability can go hand-in-hand. Hamilton discusses in meticulous yet lively detail the performance-style of great pianists from Liszt to Paderewski, and delves into the far-from-inevitable development of the piano recital. He entertainingly recounts how classical concerts evolved from exuberant, sometimes riotous events into the formal, funereal trotting out of predictable pieces they can be today, how an often unhistorical "respect for the score" began to replace pianists' improvisations and adaptations, and how the clinical custom arose that an audience should be seen and not heard. Pianists will find food for thought here on their repertoire and the traditions of its performance. Hamilton chronicles why pianists of the past did not always begin a piece with the first note of the score, nor end with the last. He emphasizes that anxiety over wrong notes is a relatively recent psychosis, and playing entirely from memory a relatively recent requirement. Audiences will encounter a vivid account of how drastically different are the recitals they attend compared to concerts of the past, and how their own role has diminished from noisily active participants in the concert experience to passive recipients of artistic benediction from the stage. They will discover when cowed listeners eventually stopped applauding between movements, and why they stopped talking loudly during them. The book's broad message proclaims that there is nothing divinely ordained about our own concert-practices, programming and piano-performance styles. Many aspects of the modern approach are unhistorical-some laudable, some merely ludicrous. They are also far removed from those fondly, if deceptively, remembered as constituting a Golden Age.