The Music Teacher

After Bernard Winter, a middle-aged classical piano teacher with a modest concert reputation, meets Lydia Harding, a fiercely talented and ambitious recent divorcee, their relationship quickly moves from that between teacher and protegee to one that involves one piano and four hands. Just as Starer demonstrated the breadth of his own experiences in his well-received memoir, Continuo, he counterpoints the Bernard-Lydia story line with a wry recital of his protagonist's mixed career. He follows Bernard, in flashbacks, from his days as a promising student to his present situation as a semi-reclusive, modest failure. In this tour of the musical world, Starer swiftly strips the pretensions off competitions, the concert racket and ""music appreciation"" courses. Minor characters, too, such as the enterprising manager Jack Bronston and Bernard's friend Laszlo, the comic-relief conductor of a local chamber orchestra, make world-weary pronouncements on music as an art and as a business. Lydia herself never progresses beyond a one-note character, even as her obsession with worldly success endangers her love for music, and her relationship with Bernard lacks real drama. Compared with Starer's numerous works for orchestra, opera and ballet, his sententious first novel is a distinctively lesser composition. (Mar.)