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Turning over a new leaf June 18, 2008

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Patricia Canovai has been at the Duke Music Library since 1993, overseeing the technical services aspects of the the library’s operation. She has also managed circulation, reserves, ILL & document delivery, overseen retrospective conversion of music scores, worked with inventorying and barcoding the collection, and helped the Music Library make the transition from the card catalog to our OPAC. After 15 years at Biddle, she is moving to Technical Services at Perkins/Bostock, where she will be working with monographic receipts and electronic resources management. Please join us in wishing her well in her new position at Duke.

 

Downloadable pdf piano-vocal scores for Bach Cantatas June 16, 2008

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Bach Cantata no. 140

Bach lovers can find a complete collection of piano-vocal scores for the cantatas in pdf here. Enjoy!

CD 15424: Mendelssohn, St. Paul June 13, 2008

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Paulus

Although Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy died before he could write an opera, he did leave us with two powerfully dramatic works: his oratorios, St. Paul (Op. 36, 1836) and Elijah (Op. 70, 1846-47). Both works have been recorded by Frieder Bernius with the Kammerchor Stuttgart, the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, and soloists for the Carus label as part of the Mendelssohn church music series in twelve volumes (still in progress). Elijah was only just recently released and is consequently not yet available in our collection, but you can find the excellent recording of St. Paul in our collection as CD 15424. Bernius’ interpretation of this challenging work is exemplary. The chorales are crisp, the arias soar, and, most importantly, the dramatic impulse of Mendelssohn’s work is kept alive. While it is tempting to interpret Mendelssohn with an overly Romantic performance aesthetic, Bernius preserves the integrity of Mendelssohn’s Bach-infused style. Don’t miss the liner notes, written by Duke University’s R. Larry Todd.

Check out the CD and score, have a listen, and enjoy!

Mendelssohn, St. Paul, Op. 36:

CD 15424

Score: M2003.M53 P42 1997

On the Library in the New Age June 12, 2008

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a stimulating essay in the NY Review of Books on the library in the new age.

New Books Shelf (June 11-18, 2008) June 10, 2008

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Never Sang for Hitler cover

“In no great hurry, the short, simple train rumbles across the flat North German landscape. ‘Today the small train of my childhood is still running,’ writes Lotte Lehman in her autobiography of 1937, from Wittenberge through the thinning pine woods of sandy Wesprignitz County, straight to Perleberg, some twenty miles away.”

With these first lines, the reader of Never Sang for Hitler: The Life and Times of Lotte Lehmann is drawn to board the train that is the story of Lotte Lehmann’s extraordinary life. Michael H. Kater’s new book, hot off of Cambridge University Press (March 2008), details the struggles Lehmann faced as a brilliant singer and actress in Nazi Germany, her subsequent difficulties assimilating to American culture after she fled the Nazis, and her final days as a teacher and mentor to younger musicians.

Poetry and the German Musical Aesthetic

For those fascinated by the tangled labyrinth of music, culture, and politics that ultimately resulted in “Romanticism,” James H. Donelan’s first book, Poetry and the Romantic Musical Aesthetic (Cambridge University Press, 2008), is a must-read. A nicely condensed dissertation, Donelan’s study of Hegel, Hölderlin, Wordsworth, and Beethoven provides a readable exploration of the intimately connected worlds of music and words in the first several decades of the 19th century.

Please stop by the music library to have a look at these books and the rest of our new titles this week!

These items will be available for circulation on June 18, 2008.

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States