Places: A Travel Companion for Music and Art Lovers Book

For most of his adult life, Robert Craft has been an inveterate traveler. It was through his long-term relationship with Igor and Vera Stravinsky that his first opportunities arose to visit the world at large: year after year Stravinsky was invited to conduct concerts of his works not only in the best-known and sometimes obscure American musical centers but also in virtually every European country, Mexico, South America, and the Far East. In addition, both Stravinskys had a great curiosity about their adopted country and, as Craft tells us, crossed the continent seven times in a car. Travel became a habit, one that Craft has not been able to resist even since the death of the Stravinskys. He too has been invited to conduct the major orchestras and to mastermind recordings in many parts of the world; but in recent years, with his wife and companion, Alva, he has been indulging in travel for its own sake, exploring faraway places for the first time, revisiting familiar ones, and in every instance making extraordinary cultural discoveries. Craft is a travel writer in the mold of Bruce Chatwin, C. M. Doughty, and Norman Douglas, combining a wealth of knowledge with a style of enormous grace, precision, and urbanity. Whether his subject is Nepal or Borobudur, Russia or China, Venice or Vienna, he reads a vast literature on the locale before he arrives there, and his luggage invariably contains an additional library of classical texts, guidebooks, and dictionaries. His gift is for identifying and absorbing the quintessence of the place and communicating his discoveries with the infectious enthusiasm of a detective solving a puzzle or a prospector finding gold. Armchair travelers as well as the more adventurous kind will delight in this book for the wide-ranging information it offers, for its detailed descriptions of the travails as well as the joys of travel, and for the author's intelligence and sensitivity. Read More