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Pianist Robert Taub ’77 has a deep knowledge of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, both as a musician and a music scholar. In the mid-1990s, he performed all 32 sonatas in a three-year span. Earlier this year, he authored a book called Playing the Beethoven Piano Sonatas, which Library Journal called “a close, careful reading of every aspect of performance from fingering to tempo.”

Taub majored in music at Princeton, earned a doctorate from Julliard, and has returned to teach courses on campus in recent years. His latest project is a comprehensive collection of the 32 Beethoven piano sonatas — the first in more than 100 years from the venerable publisher G. Schirmer — that will encapsulate the works in two volumes of annotated sheet music and 10 CDs that feature Taub playing the sonatas. He told James Barron ’77, the secretary for his class, that the new collection sums up many years of playing and studying the sonatas. By citing Beethoven’s own fingerings and markings, Taub said he is attempting “to portray an artistic vision that transcends the little black dots on the page.”

Do you have a nominee for Tiger of the Week? Let us know. All alumni qualify. PAW’s Tiger of the Week is selected by our staff, with help from readers like you.

New book: Maestro: A Surprising Story About Leading By Listening, by Roger Nierenberg ’69 (Portfolio)

The author: A veteran conductor, Roger Nierenberg has served as music director for the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra and the Stamford Symphony Orchestra and traveled the world as a guest conductor. In the last 10 years he’s created The Music Paradigm, a program for corporations that uses the dynamics of a symphony orchestra as a model for business organizations. The training sessions embed corporate professionals inside a symphony orchestra to inspire leadership and teamwork by learning from the way musicians and a conductor interact. (For more about Nierenberg, read PAW’s 2002 profile of the author and conductor.)

The book: Written as a parable instead of a standard book of business lessons, Maestro draws on Nierenberg’s real-life experiences working with clients of The Music Paradigm. It tells the story of a struggling manager who finds an unlikely source of wisdom — the interplay between a symphony orchestra and its conductor — and begins to think about leadership and communication in a new way.

Three of Princeton’s most successful teams have a chance to become Ivy League champions on Friday, Oct. 30.

WOMEN’S CROSS COUNTRY kicks off the day’s action at the Ivy League Heptagonal Championships, held annually at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, N.Y. The Princeton women have won three straight Heps titles and will be the favorite again this year. Liz Costello ’10 has a chance to be just the second woman to win three individual Ivy titles in cross country. She ran the 5-kilometer course in 16:59.9 last year, a Heps record. In addition to Costello, five returning Tigers placed in the top 10 at Heps last year: Reilly Kiernan ’10, Alexa Glencer ’10, Sarah Cummings ’11, Ashley Higginson ’11, and Liz Deir ’11.

Princeton (1-5, 0-3 Ivy) vs. Cornell (2-4, 1-2 Ivy) Oct. 31, 1 p.m. Princeton Stadium Princeton, N.J.

Princeton has stumbled in its 1-5 start, surrendering more than 30 points per game and scoring fewer than 10. Head coach Roger Hughes said this week that his team needs to find more big plays on offense. Saturday’s game against Cornell could be a good time to look for them: The Big Red defense has allowed 410 yards per contest, second-worst in the Ivy League. (Dartmouth ranks eighth with 428 yards allowed.)

After back-to-back road games at Brown and Harvard — last year’s Ivy co-champions — Princeton’s schedule seems to be getting a bit softer. Three of the Tigers’ next four opponents (Cornell, Yale, and Dartmouth) are 1-2 in Ivy play and .500 or worse overall.

History

In three Ivy games, the Tigers have been on the wrong side of three historic performances. Princeton’s losses to Columbia and Harvard were its worst defeats in each series, and at Brown, Bears receiver Buddy Farnham had 309 all-purpose yards, one of the top 10 single-game totals in Ivy history.

Princeton’s history against Cornell is a little more promising. The Tigers hold a 56-33-2 record in the all-time series and have won three of the last five meetings.

Cyclists from UBikes cross the Brooklyn Bridge on their Oct. 25 ride. (Courtesy UBikes)

A dozen Princeton students, staff members, and friends of the University’s bicycle co-op made an ambitious ride through New York and New Jersey Oct. 25. The group, led by UBikes program manager Sean Gleason ’09 and Ph.D. candidate Jeffrey Domanski, helped to bring a new fleet of bikes to campus for use in a faculty and staff bike-share program.

The group met before dawn, taking the 5:12 a.m. train to Penn Station, and did not arrive back on campus until after dark, starting at the Worksman Cycles factory in Queens, pedaling over the Brooklyn Bridge to a ferry terminal in Manhattan, and continuing on into rural New Jersey before getting a lift from a University van for the last leg of the trip.

Climbing the hills of New Jersey’s eastern highlands on heavy-duty three-speed bikes proved more time-consuming than the group expected, Gleason explained.

“We knew we were trying something absolutely crazy, and crazy’s what we got,” he said. The ride was meant to demonstrate the benefits of sustainable, local choices, like the one UBikes made when it purchased 100 new bikes from Worksman.

Author Jonathan Safran Foer ’99 earned acclaim for the captivating prose in his first two novels, Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. His newest work, the nonfiction book Eating Animals, is drawing a different sort of attention for its controversial, compelling take on, well, eating meat. Foer’s route to vegetarianism is described in an excerpt published in the food issue of The New York Times Magazine earlier this month. (In it, he briefly mentions wrestling with the morality of eating meat during his time as a philosophy major at Princeton.)

Foer shared some of his views during a recent edition of Larry King Live, and The Huffington Post has launched a series of essays responding to Eating Animals. Aaron Gross, founder of the advocacy group Farm Forward, wrote the introduction, describing the book as “part personal journey, part modern muckraking and a surprisingly candid and empathetic book on food.” Actress Natalie Portman followed with a review in which she said the book changed her “from a 20-year vegetarian to a vegan activist.”

(Photo courtesy Wikipedia)

Do you have a nominee for Tiger of the Week? Let us know. All alumni qualify. PAW’s Tiger of the Week is selected by our staff, with help from readers like you.

The last week has been a busy one for Princeton in Go Cross Campus, the Ivy League’s virtual turf war and strategy game. Old Nassau pushed Brown off its footholds on Long Island, invaded the coasts of Massachusetts and Maine, and prevented Yale from storming the shores of New Jersey. But to win the annual competition, Princeton will need to add more troops, according to Dan Humphrey ’12, the group’s “quartermaster.”

So far, more than 700 Princeton students and alumni are participating in Go Cross Campus (GXC to the initiated), which includes teams from each of the eight Ivy League schools. The object of the game is to seize territory on a map of New England, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. (Alumni can sign up at ivy.gocrosscampus.com.)

This year’s tournament began Oct. 10 and should run into December (last year’s competition took 61 days). Princeton won the inaugural tournament in 2007 but fell to Penn in 2008.

(Photo © Beverly Schaefer)

Princeton (1-4, 0-2 Ivy) at Harvard (3-2, 2-0 Ivy) Oct. 24, noon Harvard Stadium Cambridge, Mass.

In this year’s Princeton-Harvard matchup, most signs favor the Crimson. They enter the game 2-0 in Ivy League play and feature the league’s top rushing attack. The Tigers, 0-2 against Ivy teams, have struggled on offense and are now without their two most valuable players, senior captains Scott Britton and Jordan Culbreath, who were sidelined for the year by injury and illness.

But Princeton linebacker Steve Cody ’11 has high hopes for the Tigers’ defense. “I think our defense is suited to play against Harvard,” he said. “They like to pound the ball, and I think we respond well to teams that do that, as you saw in the Colgate game. The whole defense is pretty amped up about that challenge.”

Another promising sign for Princeton: Quarterback Tommy Wornham ’12 had the most accurate passing performance of his young career in last week’s loss at Brown, completing 28 of 35 pass attempts. Receivers coach Gary Goff said that Wornham is getting better at throwing to his second or third target when the primary or secondary routes are well-covered.

Culbreath update

Jordan Culbreath ’10 had been diagnosed with aplastic anemia, a rare and serious condition that occurs when the body stops producing enough new blood cells. He is receiving treatment near his hometown in northern Virginia. Princeton football followers who would like to send get-well wishes can sign the guestbook at http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/jordanculbreath.

History

This year’s game marks the 102nd meeting of Princeton and Harvard. The series began in 1877 and has been contested annually since 1934, with the exception of a brief hiatus during World War II. No team has given the Tigers more trouble in recent years. Under head coach Roger Hughes, Princeton is 2-7 against the Crimson, including six games decided by a touchdown or less (four losses and two wins). Harvard has won or shared the Ivy championship five times in the last 12 seasons.

(Click photo to enlarge)

About 160 alumni and current members of the Princeton Footnotes harmonized on stage at Richardson Auditorium Oct. 10 in celebration of the a cappella group’s 50th anniversary.

The reunion included three-quarters of the original Footnotes and representatives of Princeton classes ranging from 1961 to 2013. After a day of rehearsals, alumni took the stage in ensembles of about 20 members, grouped by class year, and performed for 15 minutes — the traditional length of a set in a multi-group arch sing.

At the end of the concert, all of the singers gathered for a set of Footnotes favorites (video of the finale is included below). Afterward, clusters of alumni performed impromptu concerts in archways around campus, said John Preston ’11, who helped plan the weekend’s events.

Peter Orszag ’91, director of the Office of Management and Budget, ranked No. 5 on GQ’s list of the most powerful people in Washington, D.C., published last week. (Other Princeton alumni on the list include Robert Mueller ’66, No. 19; Richard Holbrooke *70, No. 21; and Edward Yingling ’70, No. 24). The reason for Orszag’s high ranking, according to GQ: “For every must-have on Obama’s domestic agenda — cap and trade, saner immigration policies, educational reform — the pressure’s on Orszag to make sure it can’t be branded as, er, ‘socialism.’ ” The respect Orszag built while head of the Congressional Budget Office, the magazine added, has made him “extremely influential with centrists” in Congress.

This month, Orszag has been trying to wield a different sort of influence around Washington. The avid runner lauched the OMB Pedometer Challenge, an effort to help his co-workers in the federal government burn off extra calories. Federal employees who volunteer to wear pedometers and out-step the OMB director have a chance to win prizes, including free lunches and a “happy healthy hour” for the winning team. “When you measure something and have a competition surrounding it,” Orszag explained in a White House video, “it creates a strong incentive to do more of it.” Better health, he added, may be the “ultimate prize.”

Do you have a nominee for Tiger of the Week? Let us know. All alumni qualify. PAW’s Tiger of the Week is selected by our staff, with help from readers like you.

New book: Devil’s Dream, By Madison Smartt Bell ’79 (Knopf Doubleday)

The author: Madison Smartt Bell is the author of 13 previous works of fiction, including Anything Goes and the trilogy of novels about Haiti’s long, bloody struggle for independence led by Toussaint Louverture, including All Souls’ Rising. A creative writing professor at Goucher College in Baltimore, Bell also is a musician, part of the recording duo Bell & Cooper, which released its second album, Postcards Out of the Blue, last year.

The plot: In this historical novel about Nathan Bedford Forrest, the most reviled and celebrated, loathed and legendary of Civil War generals, Bell follows Forrest on and off the battlefield. The novel shuttles between 1845 and 1865 and explores his rise to the top of the ranks despite his abhorrence of Army bureaucracy — and his being a target of General Sherman — as well as his complicated personal life. Forrest, who is addicted to gambling and becomes a slave trader, marries Mary Ann Montgomery, but has a black mistress, with whom he fathers several children.

(Click photo to enlarge)

In advance of this week’s Princeton-Harvard football game — a popular gathering for Boston-area alumni — we present this image from a summer mini-reunion in the city. Friends of Larry Lucchino ’67, CEO and president of the Boston Red Sox, gathered at Fenway Park for an Aug. 11 game between the Sox and the Detroit Tigers. Lucchino is near the middle, wearing a yellow shirt and an orange-and-black Red Sox cap. At front and center is Dick Kazmaier ’52, the 1951 Heisman Trophy winner, who threw the game’s ceremonial first pitch.

(Photos courtesy the Boston Red Sox)