The strange tale of America's best pianist and the Australian lipstick salesman who immortalised his genius. A compelling and surprising tale of musical passion, tragedy and revival. In his prime, William Kapell was acknowledged to be 'the greatest pianistic talent since Horowitz'. Yet his return flight from Australia - where he toured in 1953 - ploughed into a mountain south of San Francisco and all on board were killed. Kapell's promising career was brutally cut short at the premature age of thirty-one. Roy Preston was a humble cosmetics salesman at Myer with a passion for home recording. Using a Royce recorder to cut microgroove discs off radio, he recorded William Kapell's last concert in Geelong, Chopin's Funeral March sonata, which Kapell performed a week before he died. In A Lasting Record, Stephen Downes pieces together the unlikely story of how Roy's recordings were reunited with the Kapell family by way of chance, coincidence and plain good fortune. A music enthusiast himself, Stephen writes with a journalist's keen eye for detail and a nose for a good story.
The Hands of Pianist's narrator is a neurotic freelance writer who aims to prove that pianos kill elite pianists. For decades, he has grappled with the guilt that followed an accident in which he severed his talented sister's fingers, ending her promising career at the keyboard. His investigations centre on the violent deaths at 31 of three great pianists, his detective work taking him from Melbourne to Geelong and Sydney, to the south of France, London, Sussex and the Czech Republic.
In this glorious celebration of food and eating, Stephen Downes, one of Australia’s foremost food critics and food writers, leads readers through the 100 food experiences they must have before they expire, based on his own culinary encounters, and his astonishing food knowledge and expertise. Some of these experiences are as simple and affordable as making and eating homemade mayonnaise, while others are as glamorous as consuming fried fresh foie gras at the Relais de la Poste in Magesq near Bordeaux.
The music of Gustav Mahler repeatedly engages with Romantic notions of redemption. This is expressed in a range of gestures and procedures, shifting between affirmative fulfilment and pessimistic negation. In this groundbreaking study, Stephen Downes explores the relationship of this aspect of Mahler's music to the output of Benjamin Britten, Kurt Weill and Hans Werner Henze. Their initial admiration was notably dissonant with the prevailing Zeitgeist - Britten in 1930s England, Weill in 1920s Germany and Henze in 1950s Germany and Italy. Downes argues that Mahler's music struck a profound chord with them because of the powerful manner in which it raises and intensifies dystopian and utopian complexes and probes the question of fulfilment or redemption, an ambition manifest in ambiguous tonal, temporal and formal processes. Comparisons of the ways in which this topic is evoked facilitate new interpretative insights into the music of these four major composers.
Mural is a haunting ‘confession’ by a psychopath known only as D. Held in a secure facility, he has been asked by his psychiatrist to write down his thoughts, admissions, anxieties and uncertainties. They are at first revealed through the stories of other people’s lives and obsessions. Specifically, D is pre-occupied with a British man who spent his early years as a schoolteacher in Australia before becoming a renowned sexologist. D is also consumed by Australia’s most prolific public artist, a man whose highly erotic watercolours are at odds with his stained-glass church windows. D writes of his meeting with a boyhood friend. He recounts the true tale of a Frenchman who went mad because he believed prehistoric stones in Brittany were shifting. Downes navigates the real and the imagined, traversing fact and fiction. Mural is daring, acknowledging the influences of European writers such as Thomas Bernhard and WG Sebald while moving into new and original territory. It is both provocative and tender, a highly explosive fable about sexuality, religion, art and obsession. ‘Mural is an engrossing read! A fascinating, lively voiced protagonist with a strange tale to tell; I was really engaged from the start.’ – Dr Gwen Adshead, consultant forensic psychiatrist and psychotherapist who has worked for many years with prisoners, including in Britain’s renowned high-security psychiatric hospital Broadmoor. Co-author of The Devil You Know: Encounters in Forensic Psychiatry ‘Stephen Downes takes us inside the mind of a deranged and violent criminal. We don’t know – or need to know or perhaps even want to know – what ‘D’ has done. But the insight into his thinking and psychopathy, thanks to Downes’s elegant, taut and compelling storytelling – ensures that this short, powerful novel will shadow its readers long after the final page.’ – Paul Daley, author of Jesustown and writer for The Guardian ‘A gripping interior account of an unhinged and violent mind. The narrator, D, institutionalised and guilty of unnamed atrocities, directs an extended monologue to his psychiatrist that is in turn reflective, cultured and misanthropic. D is a memorable character, vividly painted: a sharp-edged combination of erudition and paranoia. Downes skilfully creates a growing sense of menace as D’s thoughts twist and turn around his varied tics and fixations. This is a viscerally compelling portrait of derangement that will appeal to readers of quality fiction.’ – Nick Haslam, Professor of Psychology, University of Melbourne and co-author of Troubled Minds: Understanding and treating mental illness ‘Stephen Downes has written a captivating novel, if not to say a one-person drama. Mural traverses mental and psychological landscapes, interspersed with haunting illustrations that recall the melancholic doom of W. G. Sebald.’ – Uwe Schütte, academic, author, and leading Sebald scholar
In a wide-ranging study of sentimentalism’s significance for styles, practices and meanings of music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a series of interpretations scrutinizes musical expressions of sympathetic responses to suffering and the longing to belong. The book challenges hierarchies of artistic value and the associated denigration of sentimental feeling in gendered discourses. Fresh insights are thereby developed into sentimentalism’s place in musical constructions of emotion, taste, genre, gender, desire, and authenticity. The contexts encompass diverse musical communities, performing spaces, and listening practices, including the nineteenth-century salon and concert hall, the cinema, the intimate stage persona of the singer-songwriter, and the homely ambiguities of ‘easy’ listening. Interdisciplinary insights inform discussions of musical form, affect, appropriation, nationalisms, psychologies, eco-sentimentalism, humanitarianism, consumerism, and subject positions, with a particular emphasis on masculine sentimentalities. Music is drawn from violin repertory associated with Joseph Joachim, the piano music of Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt, sentimental waltzes from Schubert to Ravel, concert music by Bartók, Szymanowski and Górecki, the Merchant-Ivory adaptation of The Remains of the Day, Antônio Carlos Jobim’s bossa nova, and songs by Duke Ellington, Burt Bacharach, Carole King, Barry Manilow and Jimmy Webb. The book will attract readers interested in both the role of music in the history of emotion and the persistence and diversity of sentimental arts after their flowering in the eighteenth-century age of sensibility.
Stephen Downes rails against his starched Methodist upbringing to indulge in the romance of newspaper journalism. From London's famous Fleet Street, he falls in love with the adrenalin of chasing a story, the sound of typewriters and the smell of ink on newsprint. Moving to Europe in his early twenties, Stephen finds love of another kind when he meets his Parisian wife-to-be and discovers the authentic cuisine of the gastronomical hub that is France. Gut Reaction captures the fast-paced life of an international reporter and his passion for fine food.
Stephen Downes hield helemaal niet van katten. Tot zijn zoontjes in de tuin een nestje kittens vinden en het gezin besluit de vele katjes te houden. Stephen valt als een blok voor de kleine Blackie, een rustige, vriendelijke kat, die hem gezelschap houdt tijdens het schrijven, dutjes doet op zijn bureau en speelt met propjes papier. Maar op een dag laat Blackie zijn kopje hangen. Hij wordt mager en lusteloos. Wat is er aan de hand? Van dierenarts naar specialist en kliniek - Stephen probeert alles om Blackie weer gezond te krijgen. Zonder sentimenteel te worden, vertelt Stephen Downes met Blackie een ontroerend verhaal over liefde en vriendschap - tussen een man en een dappere, kleine kat.
More than thirty years ago a green and unsophisticated Methodist boy from Oz had to be taught how to dress his salad correctly in a tiny Paris bistro, and felt the first stirring that he could 'perhaps nurture an interest in food'. Stephen Downes, now a renowned restaurant critic, returns to the city of lights and Michelin stars to test France's legendary reputation for fine dining. Is Paris still home to the 'great cathedrals' of restauration or — sacré bleu — is it a city of over-fussy, over-priced dinosaurs leftover from the days of haute cuisine? His exhaustive knowledge, dry humour and fervour for fine food make Stephen's diary a delicious, although sometimes unsavoury, read. You'll feel very keenly that you are experiencing an authentic Parisian treat.
The desire to voice the artistic revelation of the truth of a precarious, multi-faceted, yet integrated self lies behind much of Szymanowski's work. This self is projected through the voices of deities who speak languages of love. The unifying figure is Eros, who may be embodied as Dionysus, Christ, Narcissus or Orpheus, and the gospel he proclaims tells of the resurrection and freedom of the desiring subject. This book examines Szymanowski's exploration of the relationship between the authorial voice, mythology and eroticism within the context of the crisis of the modern subject in Western culture. Stephen Downes analyses mythological and erotic aspects of selected songs from the composer's early career, moving to an interpretation of the voice of the homoerotic lover, embodied as a mad muezzin, in terms of heroic notions of Orphic elegy. Discussing the encounters of King Roger with the voices of Narcissus, the Siren and Dionysus, Downes shows how the composer uses the unifying Christ/Eros figure as a means of indicating that the King might be transformed from anguished despot to loving expressive subject. The book ends with an examination of Szymanowski's desire to fuse Slavonic and Middle-Eastern mythological inspirations in an attempt to fulfil a utopian vision of a pan-European culture bound together by the spirit of Eros.
Stephen hield helemaal niet van katten. Tot zijn zoontjes in de tuin een nestje kittens vinden en het gezin besluit de twee katjes te houden. Stephen valt als een blok voor de kleine Blackie, die hem gezelschap houdt tijdens het schrijven. Maar op een dag laat Blackie zijn kopje hangen. Bij toeval ontdekt Susan dat haar kat Casper wel heel bijzonder uitstapjes maakt. De buschauffeur vraagt haar of ze ergens anders wil gaan zitten, het blijkt de vaste plaats van Casper. Hij staat altijd geduldig bij de bushalte te wachten tot lijn 3 komt voorrijden en alle chauffeurs kennen hem. Onderweg maakt hij talloze vrienden, met een buschauffeur in het bijzonder.
Hans Werner Henze is a prolific and internationally famous composer of the post-Second World War period. He is amongst the most frequently performed and recorded composers of his generation, and has been the subject of numerous festivals in several continents. But he is also a composer of controversy. His music has stimulated a critical polemic of notable vigour. Tristan (1973), Henze's large-scale work for piano, full orchestra and electronic tape explores Henze's creative stance with regard to Wagner. The work represents a powerful contribution to the 'tradition' of Tristan-alluding twentieth-century works, those by Berg and Messiaen being amongst the best known. Tristan has been heard as a piano concerto and as a symphonic poem, and is a fine example of how a single piece can interrogate the styles, expressions, genres and aesthetics of major, often conflictual, trends in European culture. In this book, Stephen Downes begins by placing Henze's Tristan in its wider context and in the context of Henze's compositional output and writings. He considers Henze's description of the genesis of the work by examining row tables and sketches, draft and annotated parts, and a full score with corrections and conductor's annotations. This analysis of form raises issues of genre, harmony and melody, temporality, unity and intertextuality, and places the work in the formal aesthetics characteristic of romanticism, modernism and 'postmodernism'. Key concepts in the critical legacy of Tristan are discussed and the book concludes by considering Henze's later works, placing the techniques and aesthetics of Tristan in the context of the composer's subsequent developments. The book is accompanied by a CD containing the 1975 DG recording of Tristan conducted by Henze.
Hans Werner Henze is a prolific and internationally famous composer of the post-Second World War period. He is amongst the most frequently performed and recorded composers of his generation, and has been the subject of numerous festivals in several continents. But he is also a composer of controversy. His music has stimulated a critical polemic of notable vigour. Tristan (1973), Henze's large-scale work for piano, full orchestra and electronic tape explores Henze's creative stance with regard to Wagner. The work represents a powerful contribution to the 'tradition' of Tristan-alluding twentieth-century works, those by Berg and Messiaen being amongst the best known. Tristan has been heard as a piano concerto and as a symphonic poem, and is a fine example of how a single piece can interrogate the styles, expressions, genres and aesthetics of major, often conflictual, trends in European culture. In this book, Stephen Downes begins by placing Henze's Tristan in its wider context and in the context of Henze's compositional output and writings. He considers Henze's description of the genesis of the work by examining row tables and sketches, draft and annotated parts, and a full score with corrections and conductor's annotations. This analysis of form raises issues of genre, harmony and melody, temporality, unity and intertextuality, and places the work in the formal aesthetics characteristic of romanticism, modernism and 'postmodernism'. Key concepts in the critical legacy of Tristan are discussed and the book concludes by considering Henze's later works, placing the techniques and aesthetics of Tristan in the context of the composer's subsequent developments. The book is accompanied by a CD containing the 1975 DG recording of Tristan conducted by Henze.
A concise and complete presentation of practical strategies to hone business manners and project the well-rounded, sophisticated image which impresses clients and customers -- and increases profits.
Find out what's going bump in the night with stories and poetry from the most terrifying horror writers; Kevin S. Hall, Cecilia H. Doldan, Nicholas Boving, Stephen Downes, Kody Dibble, June Lundgren, Amy S. Pacini, June Rachelson-Ospa, Justin R. Beeman, Martha Jette, Debbie Johnson, Giselda Woldenga, Anthony V. Pugliese, Matt Mesnard, Rick Eddy, Michele Jones, Linda H. Gerald, Linda Jenkinson, Jake Elliot, Kally Jo Surbeck, Ekta Rawat, Mathias Jansson, Will Zeilinger, Delaina M. Waldron, Kimberly Klemm, Trisha Sugarek, Rae Desmond Jones, Jon Ospa and Samie Sands.
The author is a well-known restaurant reviewer and columnist. Here he nominates Australia's top fifty restaurants and provides a comprehensive and not infrequently controversial review of each establishment.
Darklore is a journal of exceptional observations, hidden history, the paranormal and esoteric science. Bringing together some of the top researchers and writers on topics from outside of mainstream science and history, Darklore will challenge your preconceptions by revealing the strange dimensions veiled by consensus reality. Featuring contributions from Stephen E. Braude Ph.D, Nick Redfern, Jon Downes, Blair Blake, Theo Paijmans, Michael Tymn, Greg Taylor and many others, Volume 2 of Darklore offers only the best writing and research from the most respected individuals in their fields. In Darklore Volume 2 you'll find discussions of subjects such as the occult underpinnings of modern rock music, the origins of the Illuminati, hallucinogens and witchcraft, DMT and the occult, and much more. Find out more about the book - including free sample articles - at the Darklore website: darklore.dailygrail.com
From a master of the short story, a collection that includes stories never before in print, never published in America, never collected and brand new- with the magnificent bones of interstitial autobiographical comments on when, why and how Stephen King came to write each story"--
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