About the Author

Bernard Holland was born in Tidewater Virginia and attended the University of Virginia. He spent the next decade studying piano performance in Europe, first in Vienna, then Paris and finally London. He returned to the United States where he reviewed concerts for a supermarket news circular before being hired as a rock critic for the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. A review of a John Denver caught the eye of the the New York Times culture department. He was hired as a classical music freelancer and a year later because a staff critic. He divides his time between New York City and Campobello Island in Canada with his wife of many years.

Reviews

"Holland has a remarkable ability to conjure up the essence of a composer or a piece of music in a few deftly chosen words. He is, I think, an aphorist of unparalleled virtuosity." --San Francisco Chronicle

"No one today can match the limpid elegance and intellectual precision of his style, which recalls the heyday of Virgil Thomson." --The New Yorker

"Perhaps the most important of this town's arbiters." --The Independent