The Blue Piano and Other Stories

Book excerpt: (Amadeus). Carol Montparker's 31 stories are remarkable for their frankness and emotional honesty. Creative nonfiction from a life in music, they are in turn tender and intense, lyrical and riotously funny. There is a poignant friendship with the elderly, irresistible Rudi; the anguish of a marriage that needed to end; true love found later; a narrow escape from an outlandishly surreal piano; moving tales from her teaching studio; each story with its own satisfying shape and rhythm. "These autobiographical stories sparkle with vignettes of people, places and petss, but their deeper subject is that of the woman pianist in a male-dominated worlld. The subject is not new, but Ms. Montparker brings to it a rewarding freshnesss of insight." Jerome Lowenthal Pianist; and faculty, The Juilliard School "Thee pianist's latest book deserves to be read by anyone who plays or wishes to playy or ever wished to play the piano, and by everyone else too. She writes about muusic in a sane, wise, humane voice in this charming, instructive, often moving coollection." Michael Kimmelman Chief Art Critic, The New York Times ; and pianiist