Musical Times

All for Jesus Peter Hill & Nigel Simeone's Messiaen is published by Yale University Press (ISBN o 300 10907 5) at £29.95.OLIVIER MESSIAEN was an astonishing and almost entirely untypical figure in the 20th century. To have emerged from the French...

Beyond the mountains Landscape and gender in Italian opera: the Alpine virgin from Bellini to Puccini Emanuele Senici Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, 2005); x, 356pp; £50, $90. ISBN 13 978 0 521 83437.THE HILLS ARE ALIVE with the sound of virgins....

TOWARDS THE END of his life, Erik Satie poked fun at the post-Beethovenian notion that a composer should have a 'late manner'. He told his friend Roland-Manuel: 'My dear friend, I'm old, I feel hugely old, and I'm going deaf too, completely deaf. So...

Head first Le Marteau sans maître: facsimile of the draft score and the first fair copy of the full score Pierre Boulez Edited by Pascal Decroupet A Publication of the Paul Sacher Foundation PSB 1015 Schott (Mainz & London, 2005); 215pp; euro154....

ONE HUNDRED YEARS have passed since André Jolivet was born on 8 August 1905. While anniversaries are to some extent artificial, they nevertheless create a welcome opportunity for reassessment and reflection. In 2005, such reassessment and reflection...

THE COMPLEX HISTORY of music in Paris during the years of the German Occupation has started to receive the detailed treatment it merits, including work on musical institutions, recording, music journalism, aspects of concert life, and the artistic policies...

IN A 1946 Tempo article 'Concerning "Sprechgesang" ', Ralph Wood examines some examples of speak-singing in 20th-century repertoire. In his discussion he presents information about the use of Sprechstimme in Schoenberg's Gurrelieder and Ode to Napoleon...

The heart of the matter The substance of things heard: writings about music Paul Griffiths University of Rochester Press (Rochester, NY, & Woodbridge, 2005); xii, 378pp; £40. ISBN 1 58046 206 5.SELECTIONS from music criticism originally published...

Whose who? The Cambridge companion to Haydn Edited by Caryl Clark Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, 2005); xx, 318pp;£45, $75 / £17.99, $27.99 PBK. ISBN 0 521 833477 / 0 521 541077.WHO WAS HAYDN? In an approach more focused on probing...