51 of 54 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Modest improvement for 2010 and hundreds more listings than Gramophone's book, February 9, 2010
This review is from: The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music 2010: The Key Classical Recordings on CD, DVD and SACD (Paperback)
It's hard to argue a product with 200 fewer pages than its last edition is improved but I am setting out to show why the Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music 2010 is better than its
last full edition in 2008 and why it should be your preferred book to have among the two available that pretend to give you an annual survey of what's good to buy in recorded classical music.
For anyone new to this publication, The Penguin Guide owes its roots to a 1960 publication called the
Stereo Record Guide. From there, the three principal authors, Robert Layton, Ivan March and Edward Greenfield, began publishing the Penguin Guide in 1975 with 1,114 pages of reviews. The three continued this process every few years until the past decade or so, when they began to update the book annually. The odd-numbered year books were called yearbooks and they frankly weren't of much use to anyone. Every even-numbered year -- and again in 2010 -- the whole thing is published anew.
Why do I think the book is better in 2010? Even though it cut its pages by more than 200 -- from almost 1,400 to just over 1,100 -- it also cut out the portions of the book that added little value. This includes long discussions on the why, where, how and wherefore of the book, its discussion of its author change (there is now a fourth author, Paul Czajkowski), a lengthy chat on downloading, and the entire section on collections. Instead, the book has only about one-half inch of pages (they don't number them) that precede the review section.
Best among those pages, from my perspective, are the four authors listing of their CD of the year (they each list one) and four pages called Foreward to the 2010 Edition. In these four pages, the authors talk about what changed in the industry and, best, the more notable new recordings that emerged. This includes discussion of the rebound of recordings from Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet, DVDs on the work of Herbert von Karajan and Leonard Bernstein, the deaths of Vernon Handley and Richard Hickox, emerging superstar conductors Vasily Petrenko and Gianandrea Noseda, new recordings of special interest on keyboard, in chamber music and vocal music formats. This brief discussion is, for me, a big improvement over the 2008 book.
In recent years the Penguin Guide has been criticized for not having much new content. That criticism is fair again this 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 the Gramophone 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, sometimes in exactly the same words (see the review of Elgar Symphonies by Boult on the Lyrita label) -- 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 I performed 10 minutes before writing this review. It 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 the Gramphone book, whose reviews tend to be lengthier (they are copied from what appeared in Gramophone's 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 the fight. It may, in boxing terms, be a 10 round decision based on points rather than a knockout, but it is nonetheless my decision and I stand by it.
Anyone that really cares about classical music, and 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. This is more of a musicological book than compendium of reviews but it makes insightful and judicious recording recommendations and is full of important information.
-- Third Ear Classical Music
Classical Music: Third Ear. 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. 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. It is far 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
GUIDE TO LOW-PRICED CLASSICAL RECORDS from way back in 1968 is still relevant today even though its more than four decades old.
-- For those interested in recording history,
Ewen's Musical Masterworks is a musicological book from the 1950s that defines composers and recommends recordings in the pre-stereo era.
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. It has the most listings to view, it comes in a more compact format than in 2008, and it runs rings around its only real competitor.
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104 of 119 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Top Ten Irritating Things About the Penguin Guide, November 26, 2009
This review is from: The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music 2010: The Key Classical Recordings on CD, DVD and SACD (Paperback)
10. What about those comprehensive, money-saving "portrait" collection box sets (primarily from DG and EMI)? Well, they're not in this book because they take up too much space to list and review. The editors promise to cover them "much more comprehensively in our 2011 edition."
9. "We feel it is useful to draw readers' attention to some [recordings] that hold their places firmly in the pantheon of recorded performances," the editors state, which is apparently why younger performers such as Hilary Hahn and Isabelle Faust (whatever you or I may think of their merits) are largely ignored while the same small list of tried and true names are mentioned over and over again: Heifetz, Menuhin, Grumiaux, Klemperer, Barbirolli, Solomon...Was the last word on Beethoven, Bach, Mozart and Mahler committed to disc forty or fifty years ago?
8. Vocal recitals with music by more than a single composer are ignored (I get the impression that the editors find them just too much trouble to list and review), so goodbye to most opera aria and a great many lieder collections.
7. Why is it that performances on British labels (Hyperion, Chandos) tend to receive higher recommendations than CDs on labels from the rest of Europe, let alone Canada and the U.S.?
6. Why is it that Barenboim, Perlman, Ashkenazy, Karajan, and even Bernstein can do no wrong in these pages?
5. Sometimes the entries read as if they're not even really trying. The glowing "review" of the Zimerman/Rattle Brahms D minor concerto on DG seems to've been based on a blurb from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung about a live concert given shortly before the recording date.
4. There's a lot of excellent music -- fresh, vibrant readings of the chamber and solo repertoire by major composers -- on such microlabels as Accent, Calliope, and Phoenix Edition, not that they're listed in the Penguin Guide.
3. Many of the classical music reviewers on Amazon and Musicweb are doing a much better job of evaluating new releases, so much so that the Penguin Guide is beginning to look like a chummy, largely irrelevant gentlemen's club given over to fond reminiscences of the pre-digital era -- back when there was GOOD music in the classical section of the record shops.
2. The price has gone up by 25%, but the book has 200 fewer pages than last year's edition?!
1.
The Gramophone Classical Music Guide 2010 is better written, better laid out, easier to read, has useful sidebars comparing versions of many classical warhorses, and it's less expensive -- but the Penguin Guide continues to outsell it.
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43 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Pathetic, really, December 10, 2009
This review is from: The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music 2010: The Key Classical Recordings on CD, DVD and SACD (Paperback)
As other reviewers have stated, this 2010 edition is shorter and even less up-to-date than previous volumes. Penguin claim it is completely revised ! This claim can be easily disputed. Take for example the entry for Felix Weingartner. It is the same in the 2010 edition as it was in the 2009 edition, citing the first CPO release 'in this first issue of a projected Weingartner series'. In fact, volumes 2-6 were all released between 2005 and early 2009, making a complete mockery of the 'currentness' of this book.
I could list many, many more such examples, but it would be wasting both my time, and yours.
I'm going to use it as a door-stop, as it certainly is not the 'more comprehensive than ever before and now updated annually' reference book that Penguin claim. Save your money and browse through Amazon for buyer reviews. I have been buying this guide for more years than I care to think about. Unless 2011 is dramatically different, I will never buy it again.
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