Product Description

This has remained the best and most successful guide to classical music for more than forty years. Fully revised by its team of eminent authors and written with wit and passion, The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music offers reviews of all the latest releases as well as the finest established recordings. It also includes an overview of the greatest historic performances, major period instrument recordings, an in-depth survey of the best of the budget-priced CDs, and the core collection of 100 handpicked, must-have CDs. Now published annually for the first time, this book is essential reading for every serious classical music fan.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #82788 in Books
• Published on: 2008-11-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 1602 pages

Review
“Indispensable, illuminating, and comprehensive.”
—The Times (London)

“The collector’s bible . . . you cannot go wrong with this guide.”
—Daily Telegraph (London)

About the Author
Ivan March is a well-known lecturer, journalist, and personality in the world of recorded music, and acts as consultant to Squires Gate Music Ltd, an international mail order source for classical CDs.

Edward Greenfield was for forty years a music critic at The Guardian. In October 1993 he was given a Gramophone Award for Special Achievement and in June 1994 received the OBE for services to music and journalism.

Robert Layton is a journalist and broadcaster.

Paul Czajkowski is the longtime editor of The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music.

Customer Reviews

guide to mostly British and often less-inspiring performances
note regarding the new (2010) edition: I would wait to see it before you buy. It claims to be 'completely revised' but based on this guide's history of underwhelming revisions I wouldn't expect much.


First, I should mention that my area of interest is almost exclusively post-19th century music -- but my criticisms are general ones which apply to the entire book.

Above all we have the the oft-noted and indisputable British bias, which the authors should prominently and frankly acknowledge. Now I'm not an Anglophobe -- there are many fine British performers and performances, but it is also true that British performances (like those other cultural regions) tend to have a certain personality, which does not always suit the music. At their worst, you get stodgy, genteel performances lacking necessary fire, drive, and rhythmic bite. Of course not all music requires the types of expression they tend to be less successful with (a lot of British music doesn't, not coincidentally), and it is also a matter of emphasis, of which musical elements are considered most important by the performer and the listener. But whether the bias here is a nationalistic or purely aesthetic one, it is important to recognize that this guide reflects a rather narrow viewpoint (written as it is by three British men of advanced age, who admit in the introduction that they rarely have substantial disagreements in their reviewing), which is not universal or 'authoritative'.

My concern is that someone would buy the most highly recommended performances in this guide and think that's the end of the story for those works. It's widely known (or should be) that different performances can greatly alter one's enjoyment and estimation of a work, so one must explore and form one's own judgments (make the time for it -- it's rewarding and as a bonus you will join the elite ranks of music snobs). I'm talking of course about differences in subjective quality, not objective quality, i.e. more in style, and less in technique (not a clear-cut distinction, I know, but a useful general one). Relatively few of your choices can be ruled out on technical grounds, so the ranking of performances is mostly subjective.

It is possible now to listen to clips on the web to compare performances or at least get an idea of their character before you buy. Besides amazon and other music retail sites, the allmusic(dot)com web site is very good for this (an excellent resource for classical and any other music; on an album's page click the 'tracks' tab to listen to clips of individual tracks). For someone who is serious about exploring classical music as opposed to just finding the 'best' performance of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik or what-have-you, I think a guide to the repertoire is much more useful than performance review guides. By this I mean mostly lists of composers and their most significant/influential works, not so much the extramusical background and 'explaining' of works that for me adds little to the musical experience, as interesting as some of it is. Sites good for this are allmusic(dot)com again (at the upper right on the home page is a link to lists of 'top composers' -- click the 'works' tab on a composer's page and you can select 'highlights' of their oeuvre from the drop-down menu above the works list) and classical(dot)net (basic repertoire, also reviews here), and the book The Essential Canon of Classical Music is quite good, with some recording recommendations (generally good ones, in my opinion).

Back to the book in question though, another aspect that limits its usefulness is that it isn't really a comparative guide. It is more a compilation of positive individual cd reviews accumulated over the years. Thus the reader, faced with say several '5-star' recordings of a given work, often has nothing to help make a choice other than the generalized praise each disc receives. To add to that difficulty, the organization, with the cd being the basic unit instead of the work, results in discussion of performances of a particular work being scattered (another review here explains that in more detail). What about the possibility that a cd contains a great performance of an important work and a relatively poor one of another - do they give it a 3-star 'average' or 5 stars because of the one indispensable recording? That should be up to the reader and is an example of how not using the work as the basic unit of organization and rating is an inferior approach.

I think the main reason this is the most popular guide is because it's the biggest, with the 'authoritative' reputation and the appearance of comprehensiveness with its yearly 'updates', and because of the lack of strong competition. If you must have a recordings guide, the best that I have seen, and the one I've used most, is Classical Music: Third Ear: The Essential Listening Companion, a comparative guide organized by work, also mentioned by other reviewers. This book has a list of some 50 contributors of various backgrounds (admittedly they appear to be mostly American), decreasing the likelihood that the writer is indifferent to the material. It was published in 2002 and has its own flaws, but it does a fine job of getting you started, which is all any guide of this type can really do anyway.

I hope this review was of help to you, and if you are interested, for starting points, in recommendations on recordings of works written after 1900, I would be happy to share mine.

Better Title: Penguin Guide to the British Classical Music Recording Industry
I should start by saying that I am a big fan of the major British recording labels (Hyperion, Chandos, Decca, EMI, etc.), but there is a lot more to classical music than the output of these (admittedly excellent) labels. The Penguin Guide seems to neglect if not ignore the rest of the industry. Moreover, Penguin has made the editorial decision to address only CDs that they wish to recommend. While a valid approach, I find it much more instructional to know (additionally) what a reviewer dislikes and why. Another difficulty inherent in this approach is that an individual work may appear in separate reviews (pages apart) because of its coupling, making it easy to read a review of a particular disc, but very difficult to get an overview of any particular piece of music.

"Classical Music: The Listener's Companion" (a "Third Ear" guide from Backbeat Books) is woefully out of date, not as thorough in terms of the inclusion of lesser known composers, and a little uneven editorially due to the sheer number of contributors. But I've found it to be far more informative and in-depth, and while it is now more than seven years in print, it can still claim to cover all but the most recent additions to the canon. Reviewers are just as apt to tell you what to avoid (and just as importantly, why to avoid it) as they are to make a recommendation. Their knowledge often reaches back to the mono days, so you feel you're getting a sense of comparison and perspective which the Penguin approach lacks. And they organize entries by individual work, so if you find yourself looking for, say, a recording of the Tallis Fantasia, then you only have to look in one place. In the Penguin Guide you will find reviews of CDs containing the Fantasia on SIX different pages (seven or eight different CDs), making it hard to sort them out other than by their coupling.

If you're willing to have a classical music collection comprised primarily of recordings from Chandos and Hyperion (again, not necessarily a bad thing), and if that doesn't make you feel as if you might be missing out on something else, then the Penguin Guide will make your life a little easier. They will make the decisions for you about what you should put in your collection. If, on the other hand, you're like me and want to hear as many opinions as possible before making your own decision, then you want the Third Ear guide.Classical Music: Third Ear: The Essential Listening Companion

Good Luck and Happy Listening!

Flawed, but I am ADDICTED!
The Penguin Guide has changed only slightly over the years. I am sitting here looking at my first Penguin Stereo Record Guide from 1975 in hard back (small format, though). Back then I was wrapping up post-grad college, working in a large music store as Classical buyer, and the Guide was unquestionably the most respected and authoritative summary of classical music records that could be held in one hand. 1114 pages, quaintly including reviews of the Beatles' albums (influenced perhaps by Deryck Cooke?) comparing them to Stockhausen and Boulez and furthermore identifying George Martin as their Walter Legge (for the younger set, Legge was something of a genius classical/opera producer for EMI particularly after the war).

It's true the Penguin Guide is flawed, that editorial gaffs persist, like non sequitur junk DNA accumulating over the evolutionary millennia. It is true that the rating system is ambiguous and redundant on its face. It's true that a few recordings are reviewed in the body text without their names appearing in the recordings list for a particular piece. It's true that some albums listed are out of print and other, worthy titles in print do not appear anywhere. It's true that it is not comprehensive. But all those weaknesses taken together amount to little more than annoyance, unless you really expect a single volume can satisfy the range of classical music consumers from novice to devoted long hair music buffs.

It is still the most readable, fun, unputdownable single volume reference Guide. From the first, this Guide has given me a developing vocabulary in what differentiates classical music performances and recordings. It has shown me titles I would never have known about. The consistency of their approach allows me to compare my tastes to theirs, and adjust accordingly.

But something important is changing, I think.

My copy of this latest volume has over 1550 pages in large format and bears the telling subtitle "The Perfect Guide to Building Your Classical Collection". The subtitle has changed several times from no subtitle, to "The Guide to Excellence in Recorded Classical Music", to "The Key Classical Recordings on CD, DVD, & SACD", and now "The Perfect Guide to Building...". These volumes are essentially the same in content and style yet the subtitles changed. Why?

Put simply, the world around them has changed dramatically. The number of boutique labels is growing, adding to the mass of music recorded from the 50s/60s through the 90s. The number of excellent artists seems larger than ever. Sampling and rent-before-you-buy services make direct comparisons possible in a way we didn't have before the Web. Furthermore, if you are an experienced listener like me, you have thousands of vinyl and CD titles each. It is hard enough to keep track of my own music using a relational database, let alone the thousands of new recordings each year. When I first began to collect seriously, no one had listened to as much music as they had. Most of us who have been listening for years cannot now get what we want from a single volume anymore. We need the combination of single volume baseline reference, plus classical music periodicals (I get the BBC's Music magazine and they have I don't know how many reviews each month), PLUS online resources. Amidst the volume of classical music information, there is no single place I can go; I still like my single volume Penguin as a starting place for several reviews that I can assess, and then I can move out from there to other resources.

I don't know about the future, however. With Darwinian pressures exerted by the changing environment and an aging, shrinking, classical consumer population, plus new innovations from the Web, our Penguin will need to adapt and evolve in the face of the public's Natural Selection choices lest it find itself, like such birds as the moa, dodo, and passenger pigeon, on the verge of extinction.