Reviews for The BEAD Method of Fretboard Mastery

The average rating for The BEAD Method of Fretboard Mastery based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-07-24 00:00:00 Rodrigo Golla I've bonded with Said over our mutual love for Maurizio Pollini, but I feel like I need to scold him a little for his mild disrespecting of Vladimir Ashkenazy. ("...Pollini's career communicates a feeling of growth, purpose, and form. Sadly, most pianists...seem merely to wish to remain in power. I have thought this, perhaps unfairly of Vladimir Horowitz and Rudolf Serkin. These are men with tremendous gifts, and much dedication and energy; they have given great pleasure to their audiences. But their work today strikes me as simply going on. This can also be said about fine but much less interesting pianists like Andre Watts, Bella Davidovitch, Vladimir Ashkenazy, and Alexis Weissenberg," wrote Said in 1985.) I've never heard a bad Ashkenazy recording (never heard him live, either), and he seems like such a nice guy. Not a narcissist, or even an extrovert, just a very honest person who knows himself very well and will tell an interviewer what his strengths and weaknesses are. In 1989 Said was still disliking Andre Watts: "Watts clearly fancies himself a very stylish man, but the phrase that echoed through my mind as I sat through his effortless athleticism was 'meaningless fluency.' Watts is one of the few performers whose technique and apparent popularity keep provoking the question, Why does he play the piano? So utterly pointless does the whole exercise seem, so without thought or even care, so without statement or plan is his playing." I'm tiring somewhat of the Glenn Gould fetishizing. Gould was someone who created fetishes - the chair, the low sitting position, the humming and singing - which may or may not have been outgrowths of Asperger's. Who knows. (I do think he had Asperger's, I just don't know if his pianistic eccentricities were due to it.) And the music world then made a fetish of Gould the man. I really don't care about all the peripheral stuff; I'm only interested in the music he makes, and the interpretations he decides on. I'm not interested in them because it's Glenn Gould, but because it's music being made. Maybe we're in a quiescent Gould period now; these pieces Said wrote in the 1980s and 90s, in the years following Gould's death, when he entered the popular culture through books and films. Of the several pieces on Gould here, one is on Gould the intellectual, relating him to Adorno. I would direct your attention to Alfred Brendel's comments about Gould in Me of All People: Alfred Brendel in Conversation with Martin Meyer. Brendel wasn't impressed by Gould, who he thought illuminated works from without, when they ought to be illuminated from within. I thoroughly enjoyed reading all these pieces, most of which were published in the Nation. Said of course was an intellectual and academic. He was also a polymath, a skilled amateur pianist, not a professional music critic or a music theorist. There are spots where his criticism is not all that insightful, and I chalk that up to being an amateur. The people who have the most insightful things to say about music are, perhaps unsurprisingly, often professional musicians. Still, his knowledge of music is vast. I was especially impressed with his opera chops. Most of the criticism here is either about opera, or piano music. He administers a pleasing beating to the Metropolitan Opera, which is staid (in its unrisky programming choices) yet also flashy (mounting crowdpleasing works). Often we get a strongly expressed opinion: "Encores...are appalling, like food stains on a handsome suit. They serve to illustrate that the art of building a program is still a primitive one." Sometimes we get a delicious sentence like: "It [Strauss's opera Die Frau ohne Schatten] requires a conductor and performers with immense staying power, who must also be blissfully unaware of the solemn idiocy in which they are involved." Said disappointed me, though, with the "unplayable" cliché: "I am now convinced that aside from the concerti, most of Mozart's piano works are fundamentally unplayable; Gould succeeded in demonstrating that point by the way he interpreted the sonatas throughout his career." I really have no idea what that means. Having played many of the sonatas myself, and heard many others do so (Glenn Gould aside), I know that they are playable. So Said is trying to be clever here, I'm just not sure why. He later calls the final fugue of Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" sonata unplayable, in a review of Pollini. Of course, Pollini had just played the fugue in recital, so obviously it was playable. What's the point of using a word that is so obviously an exaggeration, not to mention false? A pianist performs Liszt's Réminiscences de Don Juan, "an impossible waterfall of nervous octaves, thirds and chromatic runs," except that it's not actually impossible. Many pianists have done it. It makes Said sound like a rube, frankly. The book has an almost comically appalling, distracting level of typos (I counted 37). I think the worst one I saw was essential spelled essennal. There are inconsistencies in italicizations and diacritical marks. You need to pick either Schoenberg or Schönberg; you can't toggle back and forth between them, and have all the Schoenberg references in your index but none of the Schönberg ones.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-12-07 00:00:00 Shana Dills His tastes are sometimes idiosyncratic, but the depth of his musical knowledge is astounding, especially when it comes to piano and opera.