Books

The memoir of Leon Fleisher, the brilliant pianist who at the height of his career lost the use of his right hand; reinvented himself as a teacher and conductor; and finally, after thirty years, got his hand back.  I've collected additional material about Leon at the link below. 

This book fell into my lap, and while I was initially worried it might ruin my reputation, I had a lot of fun writing it with Luciano Pavarotti's infamous manager, Herbert Breslin, and I still think it's a good read for opera-lovers. Because of it, I often get consulted about people's Pavarotti projects, which is how I ended up in Ron Howard's film "Pavarotti."

To accompany Reuben Cox's beautiful photographs of a place that is special to me, I joined Thomas Meyer in contributing an essay about the sometime residence of the poet Jonathan Williams, a 17th-century cottage in the Yorkshire Dales National Park. 

Classical music writers don't always get a chance to play in this arena, so I was flattered when my piece on big voices in opera was included in this engaging compendium. See "Selected Articles" for a link to the piece itself. 

For several years, my main source of income was translating and writing travel guidebooks. I oversaw translations of more than 25 of them, and wrote a few myself. Someone once said to me that I was unlike other travel guidebook writers she knew because I actually went to the places I was writing about.