(Amadeus). These intensely personal and perceptive essays explore the author's life as a pianist practicing, performing, teaching, and writing but they could be the thoughts and reflections of any artist. They recount the challenges, rewards, and joys of her experiences in her chosen profession.

(Amadeus). Carol Montparker's 31 stories are remarkable for their frankness and emotional honesty. Creative nonfiction from a life in music, they are in turn tender and intense, lyrical and riotously funny. There is a poignant friendship with the elderly, irresistible Rudi; the anguish of a marriage that needed to end; true love found later; a narrow escape from an outlandishly surreal piano; moving tales from her teaching studio; each story with its own satisfying shape and rhythm. "These autobiographical stories sparkle with vignettes of people, places and petss, but their deeper subject is...

(Amadeus). Both a beautifully illustrated four-color children's story and a grown-up fantasy, Polly and the Piano is based upon the true-life loving relationship between the pianist-author and her dog. The book is filled with Montparker's affectionate and spontaneous watercolor sketches of her dog who lived underneath the piano, greeted piano students, learned to love classical repertoire, and kept her pianist-partner from being lonely during long hours of preparation for a recital at Carnegie Hall. Written in the dog's voice, the story draws the reader into the pianist's life the dedicated...

(Amadeus). Derived from a popular series of lecture-recitals presented by Carol Montparker over the past several years, The Composer's Landscape features eight insightful essays on the piano repertoire. Each chapter focuses on a single composer: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Chopin, and Mendelssohn. Montparker uses landscape as a metaphor for the score, whether it be a well-tended garden of Mozart or the thorny thickets on a Schumann page: the topographical peaks and valleys, the circuitous melodic lines, the thoroughfares where all the voices convene, and so on. The...