Classical Music

Robert Weinberg, 'An Opera Miscellany', Cyan Books £9.99

Since DG isn’t bringing out its 160-CD set of Karajan recordings until February, other modest little stocking-fillers will have to do.

The distinguished music publishers Boosey and Hawkes’ Music Diary 2008 (£5.99) packs in an amazing amount of useful information including a directory of venues, recording companies, orchestras and press, besides birthdays, anniversaries and last year’s global competition winners. Brit victories here are as scarce as on the football pitch; but good for Sacconi and Carducci string quartets (London), flautist Marion Ralincourt (Odense) and trumpeter Philip Cobb (Paris). Globe-trotting music buffs will be grateful for the conversion tables that include clothes and shoe sizes. Plus there’s a wine vintage chart and first aid tips: these people know the pleasures and pains of classical music. Feature continues

Robert Weinberg’s ‘An Opera Miscellany’ (Cyan Books £9.99) is another of those collections of random lists ideal for dipping into; except that some are rather uninteresting (ten operas with Jupiter in them; five world premieres conducted by Toscanini). Frederica von Stade is unforgivably unsexed into Frederick, Zdenka in ‘Arabella’ isn’t really a trouser-role – the character’s a girl made to dress as a boy by her impoverished parents – and there’s an American slant to many of the lists and anecdotes.

If you can still find a copy of James Anderson’s ‘Dictionary of Opera and Operetta’ (Bloomsbury), the lists are weirder, more abstruse and funnier. But Weinberg’s nice moments include the Muppets and opera (quite a connection), Mozart on his artistic creativity (‘I write as a sow piddles’) and Edward Heath, characteristically pompous and missing the point over ‘Carmen’ (‘suitable for a schoolboy’). And Caruso’s first-hand account of the San Francisco earthquake – the presence of the diva-crammed New York Met on tour must have added a surreal touch to that night – is a rarity. Inaccuracies include the omission of Meyerbeer’s best-known work ‘Les Huguenots’ from the list of composers and their operas.

John Amis’ ‘My Music in London 1945-2000’ (£18) is a frequently riveting set of memories by the genial broadcaster and musicologist who seems to have known everyone. I cherish his story of Joan Sutherland, the dying heroine of ‘Rigoletto’ hauled about in a sack by the baritone Otakar Kraus, who let rip a fart and startled the front stalls by apologetically muttering, ‘Sorry, Otto.’