The first major new companion to music for two decades, the Penguin Companion to Classical Music, is the unique product of a solo voice. Paul Griffiths, who resides in Manorbier, has distilled 30 years' experience of writing about classical music into an authoratitive yet engaging A-Z tour of composers, performers, works, musical forms and technical terms - both major and minor. The complexities of 1,000 years of the western classical music tradition are unravelled and explained for readers of all levels of musical knowledge and practice. Paul Griffiths navigates the major waterways of the Austro-Germanic tradition, offering expanded and detailed accounts of the major composers and their works. His net is also cast wide to include lesser known yet still rewarding composers, and he explains the connections and influences between composers, practitioners and works across the ages. He writes of them with an intense feeling of immediacy - Beethoven is 'a bear of a man, unruly but lovable, and loving' - and of the music as present in all senses - Strauss's Four Last Songs are a 'glowing unset masterpiece'. Griffiths not only gives lucid explanations of technical terms, he also brings colour and vitality to each point by giving examples and describing the effects on the music. Thus the various keys of A are 'ebullient', 'warm and spacious' or, in Mozart's hands, make music of 'seductive reflection'. The life of music today beats throughout the pages where, for example, Yo-Yo Ma's 'engaging openness' is celebrated alongside Viola jokes ('What's the definition of 'perfect pitch'? Throwing a viola into a skip without hitting the rim'). Whether the reader is browsing or looking for specific details, this symbolic work offers information, insight and inspiration for amateurs, professionals and all lovers of music. Said Sir Simon Rattle: "Paul Griffiths has produced something completely topical, but uniquely his. The writing is pithy, but chock-full of information. All the salient necessities are there, but the beating heart belongs to a poetic novelist. An instant classic, I would say." A recipient of the Commonwealth Writers Prize, Paul Griffiths has been a music writer and critic for 30 years. He was chief music critic of The Times (1982-92), music critic of The New Yorker (1992-6) and a regular contributor to The New York Times (1996-2003). The Penguin Companion to Classical Music, published in hardback by Penguin Books, is £30. It is available locally from Tenby Bookshop, Pembroke Bookshop and Swales in Haverfordwest, where his recently launched CD, 'There is still time', featuring cellist Frances-Marie Uitti, is also available.
