Customer Reviews

The Gramophone Classical Music Guide 2010: The Most Authoritative Guide to the Best Classical Recordings Written by the World's Leading Critics

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At 1434 pages, this year's Gramophone guide is 120 pages longer than the current edition of the Penguin guide, and those extra pages have been put to excellent use. Flip to the back of the Gramophone guide and you'll find two indexes: one of works by composer, another of featured performers. These alone put the index-free (and poorly arranged) Penguin guide to shame, but as if that wasn't enough, I've found disc reviews and mini-biographies in Gramophone for composers Penguin doesn't even list: Rebel, Pandolfi, and Joseph Marx, for example. (For the record, Penguin scores with Onslow; both fail to list Platti or the Bendas.) There are fifty pages of music anthology reviews, arranged by conductors, instrumental soloists, ensembles, and singers, and six pages of web listings for classical music downloads and podcasts.

More important than these extras is the quality of the reviews, and Gramophone's critics bring a literary sensibility and a quality of thought to their reviews that Penguin doesn't approach. While Penguin reviews veer towards useless generalizations, Gramophone reviews are both more explicit and more imaginative. Here's Penguin on the AAM/Andrew Manze recording of Geminiani's op.6 Concerti Grossi (which Penguin lists, erroneously, as opus 5): "Allegros are full of vigour (and bravura) while the exquisite delicacy of the solo contribution to slow movements makes the strongest possible case for authenticity in this music." Yawn.

Now here's Gramophone on the same recording: "Listen to the Academy of Ancient Music lustily laying into the thick chords in the final movement of Concerto No.4, dragging back the tempo and then charging off again...Manze is free with his embellishments, throwing in double stops, blue notes, and all manner of flourishes with an abandon that won't be to everyone's taste, but which contributes hugely to the enthusiastic tenor of the music making as a whole. The orchestra is in fine form, offering a full sound whose occasional slight rawness is no bad thing in performances of such strength, directness and honesty." Unlike the Penguin guide, the Gramophone guide will tell you WHY the music, as well as the performance, is worth listening to in the first place.

Reading Gramophone reviews is a small literary pleasure in its own right. Where else will you read of "our habitual expectation of orchestral colour in Tchaikovsky, a situation that doesn't really affect our appreciation of the early, almost Schubertian D major Quartet (the one with the Andante cantabile that moved Tolstoy to tears)"? Where else will you find Glenn Gould's 1955 Goldberg Variations wittily summarized as "a marvellously designed and executed building, inhabited only by a caretaker"?

Does Gramophone cover absolutely every classical CD and download in existence? Of course not. It covers more of them than Penguin, though, and in considerably more thoughtful prose and descriptive detail.

Once England's Gramophone magazine caught onto the Penguin Guide's The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music 2010: The Key Classical Recordings on CD, DVD and SACD trick of reissuing essentially the same product over and over, they started this book. The Gramophone Classical Music Guide 2010 is a republication of reviews that were published in the pages of its magazine from the past 1, 5, 10, 20, 30 and even 40 years. Here, they are presented again, this time in new clothing, as if they are reborn.

If you've never heard of this guide, it is published by Gramophone magazine Gramophone - Incls Monthly Gramophone Music Compilation CD-R, one of the world's oldest and most well-known classical music magazines that's been around 80 years or so. A lot of the content of this book and the Penguin Guide crossover because the Penguin Guide authors were (or still are) reviewers for that magazine. In some cases, the review language between the two is hardly any different (see the review of Elgar symphonies by Boult on the Lyrita label.)

While the more entrenched Penguin Guide went to a four star system in 2008, the Gramophone book rates recordings on a three-disk scale. They call a one star disk a good one, two disks is great, and three disks they call a classic. The book has some interesting features. Best is its listing of 100 new recordings new to the current year. If you are a veteran collector you could probably read these pages and forget the rest of the book. There are also pages on downloading, a feature called "1000 Years of Music" on musical history, and reruns of Gramophone's records of the year from 1977-2009 and a recommended basic library of music. In the back, there is a section on collections and an index.

In recent years the Penguin Guide has been criticized for not having much new content. That criticism is fair and it is also a fair criticism in this book. Both books recycle old favorites every year. However, there are only two books being published annually that do this and the Penguin Guide is far better as a guide for either the experienced collector or the neophyte that its main competitor for one simple reason: it has hundreds more listings in it than the Gramophone Classical Music Guide 2010.

Because this book has almost 300 more pages than the Penguin Guide, this wouldn't seem possible. However, a not very exhaustive comparison of the two books -- which often review the same recordings and come to the same conclusions -- will show anyone that there is far more content in the Penguin Guide than in Gramophone's book. Here is an alphabetical comparison of some composers and selected music that lists the number of reviews in each book for a composer's popular music in both the CD and DVD formats:

Bach Brandenburg Concertos
Penguin Guide 11
Gramophone 10

Beethoven complete symphony sets
Penguin Guide 18
Gramophone 10

Haydn symphonies (both books include the complete sets of symphonies conducted by Antal Dorati and Adam Fischer)
Penguin Guide 56 including complete sets led by Mallon and the Hanover Band.
Gramophone 20

Mozart opera recordings
Penguin Guide 78
Gramophone 40

Rimsky Korsakov Scheherazade
Penguin Guide 14
Gramophone 3

Schubert lieder & song cycles
Penguin Guide 37
Gramophone 33

Verdi operas & highlights
Penguin Guide 151
Gramophone 79

Wagner Ring sets, operas & highlights
Penguin Guide 59
Gramophone 32

The Penguin Guide, with 9,400 listings, has nearly 4,000 more than the Gramophone book. And this isn't new for 2010; it has been the case for as long as the two books have competed for the classical music buyers dollar. Some supporters of this book, whose reviews tend to be lengthier (they are copied from what appeared in Gramophones monthly magazine) say it is the relative quality of reviews in the two books that is their defining moments. I don't subscribe to that theory; I believe the book with more content wins my dollar.

Anyone that buys a lot of recordings should have both books. I'm not sure they need to update each book annually -- maybe updating them every 4-6 years is better -- but they should be in your reference library. Here are a couple others you should also have:

-- All Music Guide to Classical Music All Music Guide to Classical Music: The Definitive Guide to Classical Music (All Music Guide Required Listening). This is more of a musicological book than compendium of reviews but it makes insightful and judicious recording recommendations that neither this book nor the Penguin Guide include and is full of important information.

-- Classical Music: Third Ear Classical Music: Third Ear: The Essential Listening Companion. Even though it was only published once in 2000 and is a decade out of date, the contents of this book are important to any classical music buyer. While wildly inconsistent from composer to composer, this is the only book of its type that made an effort to cover the entire recording industry.

-- The Rough Guide to Classical Music The Rough Guide To Classical Music (Rough Guide Music Reference) - 4th edition. This doesn't compete very well with any of these books but it is in the ballpark.

-- Jim Svejda, a disk jockey at a classical music station in California, published his book a time or two The Insider's Guide to Classical Recordings, From the Host of The Record Shelf, a Highly Opinionated, Irreverent, and Selective Guide to What's Good and What's Not. It is more personal than the others and serves as more of a one man guide (albeit out of print and out of date.)

-- Herbert Russcol's book from way back in 1968 is still relevant today with many of its recommended recordings back with us in the digital era GUIDE TO LOW-PRICED CLASSICAL RECORDS. There are two listings for this book; the other one is Guide to low-priced classical records where you can buy this book for less than a dollar -- Guide to low-priced classical records.

-- If you're interested in what was being recommended on LP before the stereo era, check out David Ewen's Muscial Masterpieces -- Ewen's Musical Masterworks: The Encyclopedia of Musical Masterpieces, Second Edition. It's something like the All Music Guide but was first published in 1948.

For the rare collector that only wants one book about the industry on his or her shelves, the Pengin Guide to Recorded Classical Music 2010 should be that book, not thls one. It has the most listings to view, it comes in a more compact format than in 2008, and it tells you more about what's available and what's good than this book, which is better if you are more interested in reading prose.

Very disappointed with the 2010 edition. As another reviewer pointed out, the choices are so few listed under major composers for their works - in some cases 1 or 2, when there are actually a lot more choices on the market. Should have gotten the Penguin Guide. Fortunately I bought a used copy so cost is only about $5, so lose is not too great.

Record guide writing may be doomed to failure because of the vast, ever changing catalog and differences prevailing in inter country availability and personal taste. The situation is not aided by having the only two annually updated guides coming from the UK.

Taste alone has dimensions beyond performance quality. Other aspects are the genre and period of creation and the value received from both the record price and how much of the 80 plus minute capacity is filled.

For at least 25 years, I have been a regular buyer of the Penguin Guides but because of reviews on Amazon and my discontent with the growing formulaic nature of the reviews, the too frequent updates, the growing sloppiness, and the UK bias, I decided this year to give the Gramophone Guide another look.

It has three advantages over Penguin-somewhat greater attention to the United States, giving composer biographies, and giving record timings. It has many disadvantages or similarities. It too is sloppy about editing. The splicing together of reviews from many sources leads to inconsistency of tone and failures to update. While the introduction several years ago of lists of short reviews of works deemed major lessened, the problem remains of listiing only what the editors feel are the few best.

It is not helped by adding at least three other goals-covering the largest possible number of composers, historical recordings, and DVDs. Thus, pages after pages are devoted to composers, disproportionately but far from exclusively British, who seem too obscure to include at the expense of better coverage of the composers widely considered as major.

Many such major composers are poorly covered. Thus, Charles Villiers Stanford get a bit more space than the entire (Johann) Strauss family. Perhaps because of my biases, I found the opera coverage particularly unsatisfactory. Too little of Pavarotti, Domingo, and Sutherland is included; the editors seem barely aware of American singers; Met Opera DVDs get scant attention; most major opera composers are inadequately treated. One clear example is that only two La Gioconda's are listed-the Callas classic and a pre World War II effort. Both Domingo and Pavarotti recorded that opera.

The Guide has a blind spot for giant compendia. None of the purportedly complete music of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, and Mozart seems to appear. Quite often only selected records are listed for series such as the traversals of the compete piano music of Liszt and the complete songs of Schubert and not a word is uttered about why only these.

In short, its drawbacks exceed those of Penguin.

I must back up the reviews of the Gramophone reviews by Gordon and VanDeSande. For my purposes this book is next to useless. Penguin is much better and Third Ear is by far the best. As VanDeSande emphasizes, Gramophone considers only a small number of available recordings. And it's not clear how they select; they include performances that they rate low, middling and high. To match their two competitors it would have been better to considerably shorten many of their long reviews and bring to bear considerably more performances, at least for the basic repertoire, the essential canon. Their British bias is present, though not as pronounced as Penguin. Like Penguin, they are enthralled with 'period' performances. I am not. Going right to my (and a lot of other people's) favorites, Beethoven symphonies, they make no mention of Cluytens (BPO/'50's), Bernstein (NYPO/'60's; VPO/'70's), Muti (PO/'80's) or Barenboim (Berlin Staatskapelle/'90's)... and a great number of other performances that are highly regarded by many critics world wide. They do consider Karajan and Furtwangler and Toscanini, but how can anyone talk of performances of Beethoven symphonies and not even mention Bernstein. Maybe if you're British.

The weighty, exhaustive Gramophone Classical Music Guide 2010 is a top pick for any collector of classic music whether it be on CD, DVD or as a download. Over 3,000 timely reviews of currently available CDs include over 400 recordings added just this year, major DVD coverage to include opera and historic recordings as well as documentaries, details of downloadable music and the best sites to locate them, and composer artist indexes. A 'must' for any classical or serious music library and many a general-interest collection catering to music buyers.