Student Conductor - Softcover

Robert Ford earned a master of music degree from Yale and and MFA in writing from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, he grew up in New Jersey, and now lives with his wife in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

*Starred Review* Eight years after walking off the podium during a concert, Cooper Barrow, once a promising orchestral conductor, is attempting to revive his career by studying with German master teacher Karlheinz Ziegler. Everything in this remarkably assured first novel is charged with emotional energy, beginning with the setting--Germany in the days immediately following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Barrow, struggling to put his past demons behind him, wants only to reimmerse himself in learning to conduct, but Ziegler sees instantly that his pupil tends to fall apart "at the point where intelligence and emotion meet." Barrow hits that point not only in his work with the tormented, enigmatic Ziegler but also in his relationship with oboist Petra Vogel, a woman whose own demons stretch back across the now-collapsed wall to East Berlin. In a novel that echoes both Sophie's Choice and Israeli writer Nathan Shaham's superb Rosendorf Quartet (1991), Ford places his three principal characters "in a reborn city, in a reborn country" and asks them to somehow escape the secrets that lock them to the past. The means to that escape--or, possibly, the force that holds them back--is music, and Ford writes about the emotional essence of music with remarkable eloquence. This is finally a novel about power--the power of a great conductor driving a well-trained orchestra, the power of the past to enslave us, the power of the future to free us, and the power of the individual to love and to forgive. There is hardly a wrong note, from the moment Ford lifts his baton to the final refrain. Bill Ott
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