Daniel Barenboim & Edward W. Said. 2014. Parallels and Paradoxes London: Bloomsbury ebook. 188 pp.

It isn’t everyone who can say they played Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata no. 2 to Wilhelm Furtwängler, let alone at age 11. That’s Barenboim though. Edward Said’s response (“no one’s perfect”) marks him as having at least a smidge of wit and self-awareness.

There is heaps of this kind of stuff. But it is hard to pull off a book of conversations between intellectuals/musicians without it sounding like rounds of pretentious pocket-pissing. The Murakami-Ozawa memoir had that too, although not in spades like this one.