A review from someone who has actually read the book…
It’s still early days and I always feel slightly amazed when I’m forwarded a review by someone who has actually read the book rather than just the opening and last chapters with a few pins stuck in here and there in order to extract the odd fact, (inevitably taken out of context). More frustrating are the reviews that somehow end up discussing the Decca ‘Entartete Musik’ series rather than ‘Forbidden Music’ – a sure sign of a reviewer having only skimmed through in search of a few quotable nuggets which are then embedded in a retrospective about the recording series. Here’s a review from Vienna’s English Language Paper ‘The Vienna Review’. Vienna is the second largest UN centre after New York, so the international, English-reading community is large. The musicologist Matthias Wurz has not only read ‘Forbidden Music’, he’s been more thorough than most.