John Eliot Gardiner
Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven.
Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. 9780375415296  xxxiv/628 pages
Volume is bound in burnt orange cloth, with bright stamped gilt lettering to spine. Book is as new. Dust jacket displays very light shelfwear.
"John Eliot Gardiner grew up passing one of the only two authentic portraits of Bach every morning and evening on the stairs of his parents' hosue, where it hung for safety during World War II. He has been studying and performing Bach ever since, and is now regarded as one of the composer's  greatest living interpreters. The fruits of this lifetime's immersion are distilled in this remarkable book, grounded in the most recent Bach scholarship but moving far beyond it, and explaining in wonderful detail the ideas on which Bach drew, how he worked, how his music is constructed, how it achieves its effects -- and what it can tell us about Bach the man." (Dust jacket text)