“Let me be your Ruskin or Baedeker, suppose a first visit, only a week, to Florence or Burges, what must absolutely not to be missed” Robin Holloway offer himself to as a master guide for this voyage.

“My aim in this book is to offer an invitation to the glorious long voyage of western classical music for all those who enjoy and love it, and seek to deepen their enjoyment and love without getting caught up in musicology and technicalities: an entry to Aladdin’s cave, an injunction to taste and see re-angled for the sense of hearing in all its complex and various modes . Not historical, but broadly chronological and thematic, from the earliest adventures in notation up to the present day – some fourteen centuries of continuity and interruptions, revolutions and renewals, complements and contrastys via many detailed descriptions of individual composers and individual pieces” Holloway writes.

“Everything is within the art itself, at whatever epoch in whatever idiom, whatever genre or intention.” Robin Holloway

Holloway (82), a composer and teacher of many leading British composers, as his love of music began in the pram, and he sang as a chorister at St Paul’s Cathedral, where he would wake up early to compose in a cupboard-like music room. Music’s Odyssey is a summation of his work as a write on music. His ears are open, his opinions sharp.

Holloway soaring over great pains of music before swooping down on something that piques his interest. Mozart piano concertos as the work of the obscure Claudin de Sermisy, whose every not he finds special.  We also glimpse the 20^th-century modernism of Elliot Carter. He finds unexpected parallels between Byrd and Schubert, Gesualdo and Wagner.  Handel versus probing Bach: mammoth Mahler meets hombastic Strauss: Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky merged Holloways says “ What a  composer a fusion of the two would make!”

Holloway describes the fugal finale of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata as “Hammer Horror at maximalist gothic extravagance. Gibson;s Fantazia, Purcell’s religious music or or Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, ort Poor Hildegard of Bingen. The Heiliger Dankgesang of Beethoven’s A minor quartet often spoken in hushed tones, is written off as pious emotional blackmail. Adagietto from Mahler’s fifth symphony is tacky sentimental.. 

Music’s Odyssey: An Invitation to Western Classical Music by Robin Holloway, Penguin, 1167 pages £25