Praise for the The Concert Pianist by Conrad Williams
[Please click here for reviews of Sex and Genius.]
“Audacious. Exhilarating. Brilliant.”
The Gramophone
“The kind of book you pick up and don’t put down. An exceptionally good read…Great tension in the plot is finally released in a rippling crescendo at the end…The writing is emotionally real.”
Musical Opinion
“Devastatingly human…Williams’s second novel is concerned with the conflict between life and art. These universal subjects are dealt with up close - Williams never over-philosophises, but lets the emotions and memories of a single man touch on bigger questions…Painful, awkward and at times bitterly funny.”
Abigail Wilkinson, Time Out
“Philip engages our (sympathy) because his sufferings are so universal…What makes the novel so involving and enjoyable is Williams’ skill in expressing what it feels like to play a great piece of music…Harrowing…affecting…perfectly attuned.”
Independent on Sunday
“Conrad Williams’s new novel examines in devastating detail the inner life of a concert pianist…This thoughtful novel hits few false notes in its presentation of the classical music business. Unlike many fictional treatments of this world, it manages to eschew melodrama, despite its dramatically heightened plot. Intellectually engaged with the aesthetics of music and humanly engaged in its protagonist’s story, it transforms its material into a remarkably well-made narrative.”
Lucasta Miller, The Guardian
“Williams takes us to the heart of the creative condition…He writes intelligently and sensitively about music and the musical world…His rich cast of characters – pushy but priceless patrons, charming but tricky agents, critics and mentors – explore the place of the high arts in contemporary culture…and the restless and often excruciating journey undertaken by all who attempt to create or interpret works of genius.”
Sunday Telegraph
“A command performance. Flying colours…Williams writes with easy grace and an evocative turn of phrase…He is exceptionally perceptive. He follows his character’s emotional trajectory like the best kind of psychoanalyst, and makes us care what happens to him…The book’s gradually revealed truths come as a shock, which is testament to Williams’s narrative skill. He achieves a series of stylistic tours de force, some involving Philip’s re-encounters with the landscapes of his childhood, other moving into the world of dreams. The book ends with a starburst, in which the music of Chopin becomes the vehicle for Philip’s salvation.”
The Independent – The Monday Book
“I have only come across three novels that have a fictional concert pianist as the central character and which also deal convincingly with the subject: Frank Conroy’s Body and Soul, Paul Micou’s The Death of David Debrizzi and this one. Williams’s main concern is what it means and takes to be a great concert pianist…his observations on the nature of classical music, its performance and dissemination will strike a chord with music lovers every where.”
Classic FM Review – four stars
“A thoughtful and passionate study of a genius at a low point in his life.”
The Times
“Williams’s prose is carefully constructed with a pleasing natural rhythm. An enjoyable novel with vivid characters and a lot to say about the alienation facing so many people in the modern world – musicians or not.”
Muso Magazine
“A savagely acute novel…No critic, agent, entrepreneur or fawning amateur is safe from Williams’s glittering, scabrous and rhetorical assault and there are enough disturbing psychological resonances to make even the most hardened careerist retreat from the field of battle…Aspiring and perspiring practitioners of an ‘anguished art’ and would-be concert pianists should steel themselves before reading this novel. The ring of truth is brilliant and enlivening and will stop even the most blasé reader in his tracks.”
Bryce Morrison, The Gramophone
