Biographer Ellen Wroe sets out to tell the life story of the eminent conductor Cecil Woodbridge. Despite her prizewinning reputation, he rejects the idea and actively plots to stop her. Wroe nevertheless pursues Woodbridge—maestro, cellist, conductor-king—around the world, reading his letters, interviewing his associates, and discovering that beneath his towering ego lies a dark history.

The reader follows Wroe back in time, to the Royal Academy of Music in England shortly after the Second World War. There a group of young musicians are held in thrall by the star professor László Stricher—one of the world’s master cellists—who performs on a priceless instrument: the Maturin Stradivarius. Jealousy, obsession, and the thirst for greatness fill the Academy’s halls. Wroe pursues her subject relentlessly, trying to understand Cecil Woodbridge and capture him in print. Who is this colossus and how did he rise?

Filled with unforgettable characters, Concert Black is a lyrical and atmospheric novel about clashing dreams. Written in the tradition of Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Julian Barnes’s The Noise of Time, Concert Black takes readers from the frozen streets of postwar London to the modern symphony halls of Boston and Chicago. As subject and biographer veer toward a collision, both must confront the price of ambition and the cost of art.