Best summer books of 2024: Classical music

Women and the Piano: A History in 50 Lives by Susan Tomes (Yale University Press)

Even today, there are more men than women in the top echelon of international pianists. Tomes’s book is not a polemic, although it investigates why this might be the case. Instead, it celebrates 50 exceptional women pianists, from the 18th century to the turn of the millennium, who have beaten the odds.

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony: Rehearsing and Performing its 1824 Premiere by Theodore Albrecht (Boydell Press)

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the premiere of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Albrecht combs the surviving material exhaustively to give the most detailed account yet of the frustrations and hour-by-hour changes of plan that were to lead to one of the most historic nights in classical music.

The Devil Prefers Mozart: On Music and Musicians, 1962-1993 by Anthony Burgess, edited by Paul Phillips (Carcanet)

Burgess’s ambition to be a composer never came to fruition, but the author of A Clockwork Orange continued to write about music through his life. This compendium includes 75 essays and reviews on everything from Monteverdi to punk. By turns insightful, idiosyncratic and contentious, his writings are never dull.

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