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A Devil to Play: One Man's Year-Long Quest to Master the Orchestra's
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A Devil to Play: One Man's Year-Long Quest to Master the Orchestra's Most Difficult Instrument Paperback - 2009

by Jasper Rees

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"High Fidelity" meets "Touching the Void" in the improbably heroic adventure of an amateur French horn player who quite literally blows himself back into life again.--Bob Geldof, songer/activist.

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From the publisher

A charming and deeply funny memoir of musical obsession, A Devil to Play is the story of Jasper Rees, a man who unearths his childhood French horn, and begins a quixotic but obsessively serious challenge: to play a Mozart concerto--alone--for a paying audience within one year's time. It's an endearing, inspiring tale of perseverance and achievement, relayed masterfully, one side-splittingly off-key note at a time.

From the rear cover

In the days before his fortieth birthday, London-based journalist Jasper Rees traded his pen for a French horn that had been gathering dust in the attic for more than twenty-two years and, on a lark, played it at the annual festival of the British Horn Society. Despite an embarrassingly poor performance, the experience inspired Rees to embark on a daunting, bizarre, and ultimately winning journey: to return to the festival in one year's time and play a Mozart concerto--solo--to a large paying audience.

A Devil to Play is the true story of an unlikely midlife crisis spent conquering eighteen feet of wrapped brass tubing widely regarded as the most difficult instrument in the world to master--an endearing, inspiring tale of perseverance and achievement, relayed masterfully, one side-splittingly off-key note at a time.

Details

  • Title A Devil to Play: One Man's Year-Long Quest to Master the Orchestra's Most Difficult Instrument
  • Author Jasper Rees
  • Binding Paperback
  • Edition Reprint
  • Pages 336
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Harper Perennial, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, U.S.A.
  • Publication date 2009-12-08
  • Features Bibliography, Index, Table of Contents
  • ISBN 9780061626623 / 0061626627
  • Weight 0.56 lbs (0.25 kg)
  • Dimensions 8.02 x 5.22 x 0.79 in (20.37 x 13.26 x 2.01 cm)
  • Themes
    • Sex & Gender: Feminine
  • Category Biography / Autobiography
  • Library of Congress subjects Rees, Jasper, Horn players - England
  • Dewey Decimal Code B

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Citations

  • Entertainment Weekly, 01/08/2010, Page 74
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