Knowing the Score.(Book review)

Knowing the Score, by Malcolm Bilson. Cornell University Press Services (P.O. Box 6525, 750 Cascadilla St., Ithaca, New York 14851).

Here's the DVD that will free you from tyranny! All those years of respecting exactly what's on the page in your trusted editions may have skewered your beliefs about how to interpret and teach the music. This has been authenticated by the in-person and recorded performances of artists who subscribe to the theory of phrasing systematized by Hugo Riemann nearly 125 years ago. Now here comes Malcolm Bilson, an enthusiastic revolutionary who will challenge many maxims you have come to accept as gospel--and he does so with such convincing sense and good humor that you enjoy being provoked.

A lecture-demonstration, with a live audience, is the meat of Knowing the Score. Most of the scores discussed are by Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert, but there are also examples from the music of Chopin, Johann Strauss, Prokofiev and Bartok. You can listen to the entire lecture or choose specific "chapters."

The production values are superb. The music examples fill the entire screen, measure by measure, as Bilson plays and speaks or when you hear performances by major artists, comparing interpretations (and how wildly different some of these are!). You see audience reactions and ...