Norman Lebrecht ( born Norman Lebrecht ; born July 11, 1948 , London , UK ) is an English musicologist, music critic, and writer.
Musical columnist for the Daily Telegraph (until 2002 ) and Evening Standard , host of Lebrecht.live on BBC since 2000 , as well as The Lebrecht Weekly , a weekly authoring column on the Internet.
Lebrecht is the author of several books that have received international resonance. The book The Myth of the Maestro: Great Conductors in a Struggle for Power ( The Maestro Myth: Great Conductors in Pursuit of Power ; 1991 , Russian translation 2007 ) tells about the history of conducting, starting with the design of the independent profession of conducting in the 1870s. When The Music Stops , in the United States titled Who Killed Classical Music ; 1997 ; Russian translation 2004 ), the history of the music business in the field of academic music is traced and a collapse is predicted. record industry. The collection “Maestro, Masterpieces and Madness” ( Eng. Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness [1] [2] , in the USA under the title “Life and Death of Classical Music”, Eng. The Life and Death of Classical Music ; 2007 ) is a story records of academic music, including an overview of the 100 most significant, from the point of view of Lebrecht, records and 20 significant failures. In addition, Lebrecht wrote a book about Gustav Mahler ( Eng. Mahler Remembered ; 1987 ), a guide to academic music of the 20th century ( Eng. The Complete Companion to 20th Century Music ; 2000 ), the history of the Covent Garden opera house ( Eng. Covent Garden: The Untold Story ; 2000 ) and other music books. In 2001 , he made his debut as a prose writer with the novel “ The Song of Names ”, which received the Whitbread Prize for Best Debut Novel; Lebrecht's second novel was released in 2009.
Since 2008 - author and editor of the academic music blog The Slippedisc. In 2014, the Slippedisc site received about one million visitors every month, and Lebrecht, in the comments on the blog, called it “the most visited [specialized] site about culture in the world” [3] .
The pianist Grigory Sokolov refused to accept the Cremona Music Award 2015, explaining: “In accordance with my ideas about elementary decency, I consider it indecent to be on the same list of award winners with Lebrecht.”