Sound Commentary - Your Wise Guide to Audiobooks and Audio Book Reviews

Five stories, each employing different music and instruments, explore bittersweet themes that range from happiness to heartbreak resulting from youthful love and the inevitable disenchantment in middle age. "The Crooner" is the star story in the collection and is perfectly narrated by Mark Bramhall with a gentle, perfect Eastern European Accent as Janek tells his tale. "Gypsy guitarist" Janek, a refugee from a formerly Communist Eastern European country, describes his delight in the special opportunities to play guitar for various café orchestras/ensembles in the Piazza San Marco in Venice. Such a place attracts celebrities of all rank, he says, yet he is particularly delighted when crooner/superstar Tony Gardner appears in his audience one day. Gardner was Janek's mother's favorite singer; she had all his recordings, quite a feat in those early days, and the usually reserved Janek manages to tell Gardner so. Bramhall brilliantly captures Janek's starstruck adoration of Gardner and the rollercoaster of emotions as Gardner asks Janek to play for him while he sings to his wife of 27 years, Lindy Gardner, from a gondola under her hotel window. Lindy Gardner pops up later in "Nocturne" where a talented saxophonist who is having his face surgically changed at the bidding of his wife meets up with Lindy also undergoing plastic surgery, in the hotel where they are both recovering from the surgery. "Come Rain or Come Shine" follows Emily and Ray who loved loved older American pop songs from the "Great American Songbook" when they attended university in England years ago and what happens when Emily marries Charlie and they remain friends through middle age. Once again it is the exceptionally talented narrator, British actor Simon Vance who places this clearly above average as a story. Mark Bramhall returns masterfully in the final story "Cellists." Diverting, witty, sometimes funny, frequently poignant, these stories entertain and move

Ishiguro, Kazuo. Nocturnes. Five Stories of Music and Nightfall. Read by Mark Bramhall, Kirby Heyborne, Lincoln Hoppe, and Simon Vance. 6 CDs. 6.75. hrs. Books on Tape. 2009. 978-1-4159-6545-0. $50.00. Vinyl binder; plot, author notes. *A

By Jean Palmer

Jean Palmer was a librarian in a public library, then a librarian/educator at the largest private high school library in the US. She also wrote and edited audiobook reviews at KLIATTand many other national and local newspapers and magazines. She is, of course, an audiobook fanatic and, along with Fran Levitov, a founding co-editor of SoundCommentary.com.