The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music 2008 (Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music)

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 1568 pages
• Published by: Penguin Non-Classics October 10, 2007
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0141033363
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0141033365
• Book Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.8 x 2.5 inches
• Weighs: 4.2 pounds

Reader Reviews
I've owned the Penguin Guide continuously since 1984 and the 2008 version is about the tenth edition I've purchased. I've seen this guide go from having no competition to having some competition to being a model to be copied by the likes of the All Music Guide, Rough Guide to Classical Music, Third Ear Classical Music and the annual compendium of reviews Gramophone magazine puts together and markets under the moniker Gramophone Classical Music Guide 2008 (AKA Classical Good CD, DVD, & Download Guide) In all this time, no other guide has continuously challenged the Penguin Guide's leadership in relating what's new and different in the universe of recorded classical music. Third Ear came closest but published only one edition in 2000. Today, the Penguin Guide is still the best at what it does but, based on my review of the 2008 edition, it is changing its ways and is slipping a bit behind the classical music industry. I say it is slipping because the 2008 edition is hardly representative of the greatest recordings that have been issued since the last edition was published in 2005. Two significant historical events occurred in 2006 -- the Shostakovich centenary and the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth. Both birthdays generated scores of new recordings, probably more for Shostakovich than in any single year ever before. They covered one of these celebrations pretty well in their pages but didn't do so well in the other. The new Penguin Guide did best representing the reams of new Shostakovich recordings that came out that year. The 2008 tome includes discussion on the super audio cycle of symphonies from Kitaenko on Capriccio, the excellent DVD "Shostakovich vs. Stalin: The War Symphonies", and lists as its No. 1 version of the "Leningrad" symphony the super audio version by Hofman and the Beethoven Orchestra of Bonn on MGD. This even though it did not include a single listing of the series of Shostakovich symphonies being delivered by Caetani and the Verdi Orchestra of Milan. They didn't cover the ground on Mozart's birthday so well, however. I looked for listings of my two favorite Mozart CDs released in 2006 -- Paul McCreesh's dynamic and dramatic reading of the Great C Minor Mass on Archiv and Peter Neumann's SACD recording of the Missa Solemnis and Vesperae Solennes on MGD -- and neither were included. The Penguin Guide listed two of Neumann's older Mozart choral recordings but missed the newer super audio job that was hailed by critics worldwide. I was astonished to find only three listings of CDs of the C Minor Mass and an addiitional one on CD. Surely this masterwork deserves greater representation than the inadequate listing of performances by Karajan, Gardiner and Herreweghe! In fact, the more I looked, the more I found great recordings issued between guides not represented. To offer a short list, here are a few: -- No new collections of either Bach's 6 Partitas for keybard or complete recordings of Beethoven's 32 Piano Sonatas even though Seattle professor Craig Sheppard recorded both to much critical accalim during the period. -- No listing of Jos von Immerseel's recording of Ravel's Bolero, Concerto for the Left Hand, Rhapsodie Espanol, Pavane pour unde infante defunte and La Valse that BBC Music Magazine designated its album of the year for 2006. -- No listing of the Abbado-Berlin Philharmonic reading of the Mahler Symphony No. 6 that Gramophone called its recording of the year for 2006. -- No listing of the Rattle-Berlin Philharmonic recording of Gustav Holst's "The Planets" and four other insterstellar pieces of music that raised some eyebrows. It wasn't the greatest recording of the music but the Penguin Guide otherwise seems to find room to include every other recording from Englishman Simon Rattle. The fact that the Penguin Guide is now more a collection of old favorites than ever before is most aptly demonstrated in the Mahler section. In the 11 pages covering his ten symphonies, I counted only 6 new recordings from the past edition and not one of them is really new -- they are all older recordings either seeing first light (Solit-Chicago Symphony 1 on Decca and Bernstein-Vienna Philharmonic 5 on DG) or re-recordings of older recordings (Hatink-Concertgebouw 8 on a PentaTone SACD issue). With a half-dozen Mahler cycles in progress the past few years, this seems short shrift indeed as a recommendable section. Meanwhile, most of a decade removed from the Bach birthday in 2000, the 2008 Penguin Guide is still carrying every listing of the complete Bach cantata recordings by Harnoncourt-Leonhardt, Koopman, Suzuki and Gardiner -- twice! -- with notations for the Gardiner recordings on both Archiv and the Soli Deo Gloria series. To complete my list of what I perceive as debits in the new edition, the text is more difficult to read. The text size appears to be about the same (small) but italicized headers in much larger type (and a different text face) and boxes around what the book calls its "key" recordings more distracted than assisted me. Some changes for 2008: The editors seem to have changed their concept a bit this time, too, by not listing every recording they talk about in text. In other words, their ongoing discussion may include recordings not listed in the headings, so keep reading to see if your favorite is there. The editors made another change -- the Penguin Guide now uses a 4-star rating system. It had always been a 3-star system until this edition. They do not address this in the text so I can't say why this happened. I have concentrated on demerits but there are improvements in the new edition. The Penguin Guide caught a few recordings I thought might slip under its radar including a wonderful 2006 recording of Offenbach's Concerto Militaire by Pernoo and Minkowski. In addition to representative coverage of the Shostakovich year the new Penguin Guide has made a concerted effort to cover a much wider range of DVD this time, especially those for opera and sacred music. The Beethoven symphony section has nearly as many DVD as CD listings. They tend to list these in this way, always scrupulously listing the DVD director: Wagner: Tristan und Isolde (complete; DVD version) Wagner: Tristan und Isolde (complete: CD version) It still has over 1,500 pages and lists most composers famous and not so famous. I think the bottom line is people that don't subscribe to critical review magazines or do not closely follow Internet review mechanisms, and look for one guide to cover the entire industry, will probably benefit by acquiring this book. Yet, perhaps the greatest demerit of this guide is that, if you don't record on a major label or on Naxos, you don't have much chance of being included in this book. For those of us that follow the industry closely, the new Penguin Guide demonstrates, more than ever before, its inability to keep up with what's going on with the hundreds of new recordings released every month. Comments (3) | | (Report this)