
Song of Names
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
$0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Buy for $18.03
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Simon Prebble
-
By:
-
Norman Lebrecht
About this listen
Martin Simmond’s father tells him, “Never trust a musician when he speaks about love.” The advice comes too late. Martin already loves Dovidl Rapoport, an eerily gifted Polish violin prodigy whose parents left him in the Simmonds’s care before they perished in the Holocaust. For a time the two boys are closer than brothers. But on the day he is to make his official debut, Dovidl disappears. Only 40 years later does Martin get his first clue about what happened to him.
In this ravishing novel of music and suspense, Norman Lebrecht unravels the strands of love, envy and exploitation that knot geniuses to their admirers. In doing so he also evokes the fragile bubble of Jewish life in prewar London; the fearful carnival of the Blitz, and the gray new world that emerged from its ashes. Bristling with ideas, lambent with feeling, The Song of Names is a masterful work of the imagination.
©2002 Original material © 2002 Norman Lebrecht. (P)2010 (p) 2010 HighBridge CompanyListeners also enjoyed...
-
The Escape Artist
- The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World
- By: Jonathan Freedland
- Narrated by: Jonathan Freedland
- Length: 11 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In April 1944, Rudolf Vrba became one of the very first Jews to escape from Auschwitz and make his way to freedom—among only a tiny handful who ever pulled off that near-impossible feat. He did it to reveal the truth of the death camp to the world—and to warn the last Jews of Europe what fate awaited them. Against all odds, Vrba and his fellow escapee, Fred Wetzler, climbed mountains, crossed rivers, and narrowly missed German bullets until they had smuggled out the first full account of Auschwitz the world had ever seen.
-
-
Good
- By Matt on 11-10-22
-
Transcription
- A Novel
- By: Kate Atkinson
- Narrated by: Fenella Woolgar
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1940, 18-year-old Juliet Armstrong is reluctantly recruited into the world of espionage. Sent to an obscure department of MI5 tasked with monitoring the comings and goings of British Fascist sympathizers, she discovers the work to be by turns both tedious and terrifying. But after the war has ended, she presumes the events of those years have been relegated to the past forever. Ten years later, now a radio producer at the BBC, Juliet is unexpectedly confronted by figures from her past. A different war is being fought now, but Juliet finds herself once more under threat.
-
-
A very satisfying two days!
- By Frances on 09-30-18
By: Kate Atkinson
-
The Children Act
- By: Ian McEwan
- Narrated by: Lindsay Duncan
- Length: 6 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Fiona Maye is a High Court judge in London presiding over cases in family court. She is fiercely intelligent, well respected, and deeply immersed in the nuances of her particular field of law. Often the outcome of a case seems simple from the outside, the course of action to ensure a child's welfare obvious. But the law requires more rigor than mere pragmatism, and Fiona is expert in considering the sensitivities of culture and religion when handing down her verdicts.
-
-
McEwan has written perfection in this novel.
- By Bonny on 09-17-14
By: Ian McEwan
-
The Tailor of Panama
- By: John le Carré
- Narrated by: John le Carré
- Length: 5 hrs and 59 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Le Carre's Panama is a Casablanca without heroes, a hotbed of drugs, laundered money and corruption. It is also the country which on December 31, 1999, will gain full control of the Panama Canal.
-
-
Not one of Le Carré's best
- By S. Wilson on 03-31-18
By: John le Carré
-
The Boys in the Boat
- Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics
- By: Daniel James Brown
- Narrated by: Edward Herrmann
- Length: 14 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The number one New York Times best-selling story about American Olympic triumph in Nazi Germany, the inspiration for the PBS documentary The Boys of '36, broadcast to coincide with the 2016 Summer Olympics and the 80th anniversary of the boys' gold medal race. Out of the depths of the Depression comes an irresistible story about beating the odds and finding hope in the most desperate of times - the improbable, intimate account of how nine working-class boys from the American West showed the world at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin what true grit really meant.
-
-
Dear Publishers of Audio Books
- By Lynn on 08-04-14
-
Absolute Friends
- By: John le Carré
- Narrated by: John le Carré
- Length: 6 hrs and 34 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
By chance and not by choice, Ted Mundy, eternal striver, failed writer, and expatriate son of a British Army officer, used to be a spy. But that was in the good old Cold War days when a cinder-block wall divided Berlin and the enemy was easy to recognize.
-
-
Save Time and Listen. Don't read
- By Cyrus on 02-04-04
By: John le Carré
-
The Escape Artist
- The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World
- By: Jonathan Freedland
- Narrated by: Jonathan Freedland
- Length: 11 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In April 1944, Rudolf Vrba became one of the very first Jews to escape from Auschwitz and make his way to freedom—among only a tiny handful who ever pulled off that near-impossible feat. He did it to reveal the truth of the death camp to the world—and to warn the last Jews of Europe what fate awaited them. Against all odds, Vrba and his fellow escapee, Fred Wetzler, climbed mountains, crossed rivers, and narrowly missed German bullets until they had smuggled out the first full account of Auschwitz the world had ever seen.
-
-
Good
- By Matt on 11-10-22
-
Transcription
- A Novel
- By: Kate Atkinson
- Narrated by: Fenella Woolgar
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1940, 18-year-old Juliet Armstrong is reluctantly recruited into the world of espionage. Sent to an obscure department of MI5 tasked with monitoring the comings and goings of British Fascist sympathizers, she discovers the work to be by turns both tedious and terrifying. But after the war has ended, she presumes the events of those years have been relegated to the past forever. Ten years later, now a radio producer at the BBC, Juliet is unexpectedly confronted by figures from her past. A different war is being fought now, but Juliet finds herself once more under threat.
-
-
A very satisfying two days!
- By Frances on 09-30-18
By: Kate Atkinson
-
The Children Act
- By: Ian McEwan
- Narrated by: Lindsay Duncan
- Length: 6 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Fiona Maye is a High Court judge in London presiding over cases in family court. She is fiercely intelligent, well respected, and deeply immersed in the nuances of her particular field of law. Often the outcome of a case seems simple from the outside, the course of action to ensure a child's welfare obvious. But the law requires more rigor than mere pragmatism, and Fiona is expert in considering the sensitivities of culture and religion when handing down her verdicts.
-
-
McEwan has written perfection in this novel.
- By Bonny on 09-17-14
By: Ian McEwan
-
The Tailor of Panama
- By: John le Carré
- Narrated by: John le Carré
- Length: 5 hrs and 59 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Le Carre's Panama is a Casablanca without heroes, a hotbed of drugs, laundered money and corruption. It is also the country which on December 31, 1999, will gain full control of the Panama Canal.
-
-
Not one of Le Carré's best
- By S. Wilson on 03-31-18
By: John le Carré
-
The Boys in the Boat
- Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics
- By: Daniel James Brown
- Narrated by: Edward Herrmann
- Length: 14 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The number one New York Times best-selling story about American Olympic triumph in Nazi Germany, the inspiration for the PBS documentary The Boys of '36, broadcast to coincide with the 2016 Summer Olympics and the 80th anniversary of the boys' gold medal race. Out of the depths of the Depression comes an irresistible story about beating the odds and finding hope in the most desperate of times - the improbable, intimate account of how nine working-class boys from the American West showed the world at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin what true grit really meant.
-
-
Dear Publishers of Audio Books
- By Lynn on 08-04-14
-
Absolute Friends
- By: John le Carré
- Narrated by: John le Carré
- Length: 6 hrs and 34 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
By chance and not by choice, Ted Mundy, eternal striver, failed writer, and expatriate son of a British Army officer, used to be a spy. But that was in the good old Cold War days when a cinder-block wall divided Berlin and the enemy was easy to recognize.
-
-
Save Time and Listen. Don't read
- By Cyrus on 02-04-04
By: John le Carré
-
The Good Liar
- A Novel
- By: Nicholas Searle
- Narrated by: Matthew Brenher
- Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Veteran con artist Roy spots an obvious easy mark when he meets Betty, a wealthy widow, online. In no time at all, he's moved into Betty's lovely cottage and is preparing to accompany her on a romantic trip to Europe. Betty's grandson disapproves of their blossoming relationship, but Roy is sure this scheme will be a success. He knows what he's doing. As this remarkable feat of storytelling weaves together Roy's and Betty's futures, it also unwinds their pasts.
-
-
Hope the movie is better than the book?
- By S. Smith on 10-17-19
By: Nicholas Searle
-
The Mission Song
- By: John le Carré
- Narrated by: David Oyelowo
- Length: 11 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Abandoned by his parents, Bruno Salvador has long looked for guidance. He found it in Mr. Anderson of British Intelligence. Working for Anderson in a clandestine facility, Salvo (as he's known) translates intercepted phone calls, bugged recordings, and snatched voice-mail messages. When Anderson sends him to a mysterious island to interpret during a secret conference, Bruno thinks he is helping Britain--but then he hears something he should not have.
-
-
Only a tease, a taunt of le Carré's brilliance
- By Darwin8u on 03-24-15
By: John le Carré
-
Another Side of Paradise
- A Novel
- By: Sally Koslow
- Narrated by: Ana Clements
- Length: 10 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1937 Hollywood, gossip columnist Sheilah Graham’s star is on the rise while literary wonder boy F. Scott Fitzgerald’s career is slowly drowning in booze. But the once-famous author, desperate to make money penning scripts for the silver screen, is charismatic enough to attract the gorgeous Miss Graham, a woman who exposes the secrets of others while carefully guarding her own.
-
-
Narrator interfered with my enjoyment of the book
- By Suzanne Stokes on 10-11-18
By: Sally Koslow
-
Lessons
- By: Ian McEwan
- Narrated by: Simon McBurney
- Length: 17 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has closed, eleven-year-old Roland Baines's life is turned upside down. 2,000 miles from his mother's protective love, stranded at an unusual boarding school, his vulnerability attracts piano teacher Miss Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade.
-
-
Narrator Simon McBurney gets my 100% rating
- By Peggy M on 09-26-22
By: Ian McEwan
-
The Constant Gardener
- By: John le Carré
- Narrated by: Michael Jayston
- Length: 17 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Frightening, heartbreaking, and exquisitely calibrated, John le Carré's new novel opens with the gruesome murder of the young and beautiful Tessa Quayle near northern Kenya's Lake Turkana, the birthplace of mankind. Her putative African lover and traveling companion, a doctor with one of the aid agencies, has vanished from the scene of the crime. Tessa's much older husband, Justin, a career diplomat at the British High Commission in Nairobi, sets out on a personal odyssey in pursuit of the killers and their motive.
-
-
Greatest love story of the last fifty years
- By Darwin8u on 06-30-13
By: John le Carré
-
The Prague Sonata
- By: Bradford Morrow
- Narrated by: Christina Delaine
- Length: 18 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the early days of the new millennium, pages of a worn and weathered original sonata manuscript - the gift of a Czech immigrant living out her final days in Queens - come into the hands of Meta Taverner, a young musicologist whose concert piano career was cut short by an injury. To Meta's eye, it appears to be an authentic 18th-century work; to her discerning ear, the music rendered there is commanding, hauntingly beautiful, clearly the undiscovered composition of a master. But there is no indication of who the composer might be.
-
-
Wonderful topic, writer gets in the way
- By Amber's mom on 07-31-18
By: Bradford Morrow
-
A Delicate Truth
- A Novel
- By: John le Carré
- Narrated by: John le Carré
- Length: 10 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A counter-terrorist operation, code-named Wildlife, is being mounted on the British crown colony of Gibraltar. Its purpose: To capture and abduct a high-value jihadist arms buyer. Its authors: An ambitious Foreign Office Minister, a private defense contractor who is also his bosom friend, and a shady American CIA operative of the evangelical far-right. So delicate is the operation that even the Minister’s personal private secretary, Toby Bell, is not cleared for it. Three years later, a disgraced Special Forces Soldier delivers a message from the dead.
-
-
I haven't enjoyed a tale this much in many listens
- By connie on 05-10-13
By: John le Carré
-
Amsterdam
- By: Ian McEwan
- Narrated by: Steven Crossley
- Length: 4 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The best-selling author of Atonement and Enduring Love, Ian McEwan is known as one of contemporary fiction’s most acclaimed writers. This Booker Prize-winning novel by McEwan finds two men connecting at the funeral of their ex-lover. Distressed by how she was slowly destroyed by an illness, the two make a pact to save each other from enduring such a fate.
-
-
Make something, and die.
- By Darwin8u on 02-07-17
By: Ian McEwan
-
Voyage of Innocence
- By: Elizabeth Edmondson
- Narrated by: Nicolette McKenzie
- Length: 15 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From the author of The Frozen Lake comes an enthralling novel of love, betrayal, and idealism as three very different young women go up to Oxford in the years immediately before World War Two. Vee - the clergyman’s daughter. Boyish, alluring, she plans to use her time at Oxford to put right everything that went wrong in her loveless childhood.
-
-
Narration is good; but sordid storyline detracts
- By Amazon Customer on 03-23-21
-
Shrines of Gaiety
- A Novel
- By: Kate Atkinson
- Narrated by: Jason Watkins
- Length: 15 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
1926, and in a country still recovering from the Great War, London has become the focus for a delirious new nightlife. In the clubs of Soho, peers of the realm rub shoulders with starlets, foreign dignitaries with gangsters, and girls sell dances for a shilling a time. The notorious queen of this glittering world is Nellie Coker, ruthless but also ambitious to advance her six children, including the enigmatic eldest, Niven, whose character has been forged in the crucible of the Somme. But success breeds enemies, and Nellie’s empire faces threats from without and within.
-
-
Rich characters of all stripes
- By Glorious Lorius on 11-09-22
By: Kate Atkinson
-
Single & Single
- By: John le Carré
- Narrated by: Michael Jayston
- Length: 12 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A lawyer from the London finance house of Single & Single is shot dead on a Turkish hillside by people with whom he thought he was in business. A children's magician is asked by his bank to explain the unsolicited arrival of more than five million pounds sterling in his young daughter's modest trust. A freighter bound for Liverpool is boarded by Russian coast guards in the Black Sea. The celebrated London merchant venturer "Tiger" Single disappears into thin air.
-
-
The spy who came back to the bank
- By Darwin8u on 03-12-14
By: John le Carré
-
Lunch with Charlotte
- By: Leon Berger
- Narrated by: Leon Berger
- Length: 9 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Every Friday for the last 25 years of her life, I had lunch with Charlotte and each week she told me more of her extraordinary story. To all appearances, she was a strong and dignified survivor, with old-world courtesies, a twinkling sense of humor, and a lilting Austrian syntax. Yet deep within, she'd been scarred by a profound personal trauma.
-
-
A Well-told, Heart-wrenching Novel
- By deebuff on 01-08-16
By: Leon Berger
Critic reviews
What listeners say about Song of Names
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Corey
- 02-18-16
Great voice actor
I loved the reader. I thought he did a wonderful job narrating. It is obviously a beautiful and important story; I just couldn't ever really fall in love with the characters. They were all so self-involved, and not in an endearing way. But, a valuable existing within difficult times and the classic music industry. Even though I was never really able to *love* it; I recommend it.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
2 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Simone
- 05-12-15
Unfulfilling
I am not sure what to make of it of this book, seems to be a trend for me lately!
I enjoyed the story as it was unfolding, the characters were appealing and the plot was interesting… but once it was done, taking a step back and looking it as a whole, it disappointed me.
What was it? A brotherly love story? A holocaust memoir? A murder mystery? An investigation into a disappearance? In the end it was none of those so I just felt unfulfilled which leads me to think I probably missed the point.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Cris
- 11-02-11
A Little too Highbrow for the Average Reader
like me. The story is the tale of the relationship of two unlikable characters. Both are Jewish--one a musical prodigy and one the son of a British promoter of music. The story begins right before the onset of WWII in England. I kept wanting to like the book and waiting for something redeeming. The best that I could come up with is that it was an interesting look at the lives of those who nurture a genius. The rewards seem to be few both for the genius and the people who surround him. Those who understand Jewish religious practices might find this book more understandable and rewarding because it provides interesting insights for the context and the setting.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
6 people found this helpful