New Books in Performing Arts

Today, the Hong Kong Philharmonic is one of the world’s great symphony orchestras. But when John Duffus landed in Hong Kong in 1979 as the Philharmonic’s general manager–its fifth in as many years–he quickly learned just how much work needed to be done to make a Western symphony orchestra work in a majority Chinese city.
John Duffus’s memoir Backstage in Hong Kong: A Life with the Philharmonic, Broadway Musicals and Classical Superstars (Blacksmith: 2024) charts his life from running the Philharmonic, bringing acts like the Three Tenors and Cats to Asia, and his thoughts on the Hong Kong Cultural Center and the West Kowloon Cultural District.
John joins the show today to explain what the general manager of an orchestra actually does, the trickiest problems he had to solve in Hong Kong and China, and his thoughts on whether Hong Kong is truly a “cultural wasteland.”
You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Backstage in Hong Kong. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.
Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.
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The Embassy, the Ambush, and the Ogre: Greco-Roman Influence in Sanskrit Theater (Open Book, 2024) presents a sophisticated and intricate examination of the parallels between Sanskrit and Greco-Roman literature. By means of a philological and literary analysis, Morales-Harley hypothesizes that Greco-Roman literature was known, understood, and recreated in India. Moreover, it is argued that the techniques for adapting epic into theater could have been Greco-Roman influences in India, and that some of the elements adapted within the literary motifs (specifically the motifs of the embassy, the ambush, and the ogre) could have been Greco-Roman borrowings by Sanskrit authors.
This book draws on a wide variety of sources, including Iliad, Phoenix, Rhesus and Cyclops (Greco-Roman) as well as Mahābhārata, The Embassy, The Five Nights and The Middle One (Sanskrit). The result is a well-supported argument which presents us with the possibility of cultural exchange between the Greco-Roman world and India – a possibility which, though hypothetical, is worth acknowledging.
This book is available open access here. 
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What happens when the elitist space of 'Western' classical music seeks to diversify itself? And what are the social effects worked through diversity discourses in classical music institutions? The Sound of Difference: Race, Class and the Politics of 'Diversity' in Classical Music (Manchester UP, 2024) by Dr. Kristina Kolbe addresses these concerns by critically examining how diversity work takes shape in a cultural sector so deeply implicated in hierarchies of class, structures of whiteness, and legacies of imperialism.
The book draws from ethnographic and interview data to analyse how diversity discourses become constructed in the organisational and creative processes of music production. From rehearsal and performance practices to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the sector's commitment to change, Dr. Kolbe reveals the institutional constraints and precarious labour relations that form around diversity work in classical music and skillfully considers what these processes can tell us about the remaking of class, race, and racism today.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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For fans of musical theatre, Stephen Sondheim is one of the true titans – the genius who brought us Sweeney Todd and West Side Story, Into the Woods, and Company. With acclaimed revivals of his landmark shows regularly performed in London and New York, and new generations being introduced to the man who forever transformed musical theatre, Sondheim’s legacy has only grown. What is it about such classic songs as ‘Being Alive’ from
Company, ‘No One Is Alone’ from Into the Woods, or ‘Send in the Clowns’ from A Little Night Music (to name but a few) that still resonates for so many?
In How Sondheim Can Change Your Life (Atria Books (North America) Ebury (UK and Commonwealth), 2024), Dr. Richard Schoch shows how Sondheim’s greatness (beyond the clever lyrics and adventurous music) lies in his ability to tell stories that speak to all of us. From Louise’s desire for freedom as Gypsy Rose Lee to Sweeney Todd’s thirst for revenge, the struggles we see in Sondheim’s characters are ones we all have – and we can learn valuable lessons from how those struggles are resolved.
Following the arc of Sondheim’s extraordinary career, How Sondheim Can Change Your Life is rich with stories and insights into the master’s creative process, and reveals the many ways that Sondheim’s works can enrich the lives of all of us.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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It is often assumed that classical Sanskrit poetry and drama lack a concern with the tragic. However, as Bihani Sarkar makes clear in Classical Sanskrit Tragedy: The Concept of Suffering and Pathos in Medieval India (I. B. Tauris, 2021), this is far from the case. In the first study of tragedy in classical Sanskrit literature, Sarkar draws on a wide range of Sanskrit dramas, poems and treatises - much of them translated for the first time into English - to provide a complete history of the tragic in Indian literature from the second to the fourth centuries.
Looking at Kalidasa, the most celebrated writer of Sanskrit poetry and drama (kavya), this book argues that constructions of absence and grief are central to Kalidasa's compositions and that these 'tragic middles' are much more sophisticated than previously understood. For Kalidasa, tragic middles are modes of thinking, in which he confronts theological and philosophical issues. Through a close literary analysis of the tragic middle in five of his works, the Abhijñanasakuntala, the Raghuva?sa, the Kumarasambhava, the Vikramorvasiya and the Meghaduta, Sarkar demonstrates the importance of tragedy for classical Indian poetry and drama in the early centuries of the common era. These depictions from the Indian literary sphere, by their particular function and interest in the phenomenology of grief, challenge and reshape in a wholly new way our received understanding of tragedy.
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