Concerto Conversations.

by Joseph Kerman. Harvard University Press (79 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138-1423), 1999. 174 pp., $19.95.

In 1997-1998 Joseph Kerman, professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley, became the Charles Eliot Norton Lecturer at Harvard University. In the past, this one-year position has been held by an illustrious group of musicians including Leonard Bernstein, Igor Stravinsky and Aaron Copland. Among the various responsibilities the professorship involves is the delivery of a series of six public lectures on a particular topic. Concerto Conversations is a compilation of Kerman's Norton lectures.

The New Harvard Dictionary of Music states that the word concerto comes from the Italian concertare, to join together, and that it is related to the Latin concertare, which means to fight or contend. As the definition suggests, Kerman considers the interplay in the concerto between the soloist and the orchestra, and compares these to human relationships. In six chapters, the relationship of soloist to orchestra is vividly portrayed in human terms, delighting the reader's imagination.

The lists of concertos discussed in the book are admitted favorites of the author. The beginning and early development of the concerto genre in the baroque and classical periods are made clear. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century contributions to the form are illustrated by examining the romantic concertos of Tchaikovsky and Schumann and the contemporary concertos of Prokofiev and Bartok. Included with the book is a ...