9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A MUST read, November 22, 2006
This review is from: A Composer's Notes: Remembering Miklós Rózsa (Paperback)
I grew up listening to, and collecting on LP's (remember those?), movie soundtrack music. One of my favorite composers of that time period was Miklos Rozsa. Jeffrey Dane has written a thoroughly enjoyable book, I read in in one day because I just couldn't put it down. Not only is this book a narrative of an extraordinary friendship and an insight into the delightful personality of Rozsa, but Mr. Dane includes many other musical references, anecdotes, and explainations that are sure to keep the reader engrossed and entertained. I highly recommend this book for serious music students and for just plain music lovers in general.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Remembering a 'friend', January 23, 2007
This review is from: A Composer's Notes: Remembering Miklós Rózsa (Paperback)
A very interesting book that relates about a too much unknown art: the film music,
espacially here, in Europe, precisely in France.
The opportunities to get more about Miklos Rozsa are so rare we only could get happy to read this book.
If we have to nominate one: he was the greatest film music composer !
He has been my friend for about ten years, and I have been happy to visit him at his home in 93.
Guy Mouchet - Nantes - France
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing "remembrance", September 17, 2010
This review is from: A Composer's Notes: Remembering Miklós Rózsa (Paperback)
Throughout a long, impressive career, Miklos Rozsa composed some of the finest music for motion pictures. I bought this book in anticipation of finding some perceptive analysis of his music together with some interesting facets to his personality from someone who knew him. Alas Jeffrey Dane's book offers neither. To be fair, Dane does not pretend that his book is anything other than, as he describes it, "a personal recollection" but is that sufficient to engage a general readership? Writing a remembrance in which the writer has sufficient knowledge about the subject to inform the reader is fine but, although Dane describes himself as a friend of Rozsa, there are none of those intimate details or confidences to suggest that Dane had very much more than a casual relationship - although the back cover, with its reference to decades of friendship, suggests otherwise.
The main section of the book contains typed reproductions of around 40 items of correspondence from Rozsa to Dane. These consist of postcards, Christmas cards and letters. Unfortunately, the correspondence is essentially trivial in nature; the majority of which begin by thanking Dane for the receipt of a gift of some kind. Rightly or wrongly, the book comes across as a piece of fan worship, resulting in a book of uncritical adulation which ill-serves the composer, who, in terms of biographical remembrance, surely deserves something better.
The arrangement of the book is all over the place, with occasional detours and separate chapters to discuss other composers which indicate padding more than anything else. And what are we to make of the strange, bitter paragraph - seemingly inserted at random, for it relates to nothing which precedes or follows it - in which Dane berates some unidentified individual who apparently harbours a long standing resentment toward the author and whose hostility, we are told, continues to the present time?
It's also unfortunate that Dane's writing betrays a considerable arrogance. If it's one thing I would advise a would-be author not to do, it is to spend an entire chapter rubbishing publishing houses which, apparently, don't have the business acumen to recognise such a valuable work, and which led to Dane going down the self publishing route. Well, sorry Jeffrey, but if I had been the one to read your manuscript, I'd have returned it with one of those "Having carefully considered etc." letters.
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