America's Concertmasters. By Anne Mischakoff Heiles. Detroit Monographs in Musicology/Studies in Music 51. Sterling Heights, Mich.: Harmonie Park Press, 2007. ISBN-13: 978089991398. 564 pp. $40.00.


In America's Concertmasters, Anne Mischakoff Heiles presents the reader with in-depth, informative, and at times entertaining glimpses into the lives, passions, and philosophies of the concertmasters of twelve major North American orchestras. The daughter of Mischa Mischakoff, the concertmaster of the Chicago, Detroit, and NBC symphonies, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the New York symphony society, Heiles has a self-acknowledged reverence for the concertmaster position and the men and women who have held it, which reveals itself in subjective statements such as "instead of hardnosed cynicism, Dicterow has disarming charm" (377) and, in speaking of Joseph Silverstein, "A more tactful concertmaster cannot be found" (62). The 564-page tome, however, is not simply an enthusiastic espousal of the position Heiles' father held for so many years, but is also a well-researched, exhaustively cited, and ultimately readable history of one of the most prominent positions in the classical music world.