Guide to the Pianist's Repertoire. (Diverse Topics).

Guide to the Pianist's Repertoire. By Maurice Hinson. 3d ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. [xli, 933 p. ISBN 0-253-33646-5. $59.95.]

Maurice Hinson has provided a new edition to what has been called "the most important bibliographical source book relating to music for solo piano in the English language" (Piano Quarterly 36, no. 140 [winter 1987-88]: 63). How much has changed? Not much. Mostly, what is provided is an update to the 1987 second edition to keep citations current and incorporate some recent publications while removing out-of-print ones. Hinson notes the "small but growing interest in minimal music" over the last decade, as well as the "big pendulum swing ... toward freely tonal writing" (p. ix). Still, overall coverage remains quite consistent. The things that make the Guide to the Pianist's Repertoire valuable are all still intact:

* publisher and edition information (including numbering concordances for composers with especially complicated publishing histories, such as Haydn or Scarlatti);

* brief biographical sketches of important composers;

* comments on compositional style and technique, and notable characteristics of specific works;

* graded levels of difficulty for most works;

* indexes to composers' nationality, and of black and women composers;