THE GRAMOPHONE CLASSICAL MUSIC GUIDE 2010.
Edited by James Jolly. Teddington: Haymarket, 2010. xxvi + 1434 pp. Paperback. $34.95
This hefty volume, the latest in a continuing series, gathers up shortened CD and DVD reviews of the “best” recordings from
Gramophone
, bolstered with some background information about the composers, a brief essay on the history of classical music over the past 1,000 years, a primer on downloading, a listing of
Gramophone
Award winners, a list of new recordings added to the guide since its previous edition, and a “suggested basic library.” There are, for some important works, additional “box-at-a-glance” comments. Each review is accompanied by a four-point rating system, which covers the range from “recommended” to “classic.”
The critics of
Gramophone
are, of course, erudite and experienced—and especially since the choice of reviews has been filtered (and sometimes toned down) for this volume, their recommendations can be trusted to be sound and uneccentric. Certainly, for a rough-and-ready guide, this will serve you well. Still, some caveats are in order, especially if you haven’t seen previous versions of the guide or haven’t read Raymond Tuttle’s review of the 2005 compilation, titled
The Classical Good CD and DVD Guide
(
Fanfare
28: 5).
The most striking drawback is the erasure of individuality. While the critics who have contributed are all listed in the beginning of the book, the reviews are not individually signed.
Gramophone
’s editor, James Jolly, takes credit for
selecting
the reviews, but it’s not clear who revised them or, more important, who’s responsible for the ratings. Did Jolly really amend them all without assistance? Even if he did, can he have listened to all the recordings—or can he have rated records he’s never heard?
The result of this authorial erasure is a kind of exalted anonymity; instead of reading the subjective views of individual critics we’ve come to know (or whom we come to know as we leaf through the book), we confront a series of
ex-cathedra
verdicts. The sense that we’re reading eternal pronouncements of value is heightened by the decision to eliminate first-person references and—more significant—the decision not to date the reviews, which lifts comparative claims out of the valley of their original contexts to a summit of trans-historical judgment. What does it mean to say that Solti’s Mahler Eighth “makes a plausible first choice—now more than ever” when we have no idea what the “now” refers to? (For the record, the claim was made nearly 15 years ago, in May 1996, before the Rattle, the Boulez, the Nagano, and the Tilson Thomas, among others, had appeared.)
But of course you can’t fully erase the voices of the critics, so their disagreements simmer under the surface, often giving the book the appearance of contradiction. Thus, for instance, the three-star (actually, they use discs, not stars) review of Hough’s Rachmaninoff concertos tells us that there are only two other sets at a comparable level: Wild’s and Rachmaninoff’s own. Yet Rachmaninoff’s doesn’t get a review at all here, and Wild’s gets a measly one-star rating, significantly behind Ashkenazy’s, which isn’t even mentioned as a viable contender in the Hough review. What gives? You’d never figure it out from reading this book, but if you go back to the original issues of
Gramophone
(more on that later), you find that the Hough was reviewed by Jeremy Nicholas in 2004, the Ashkenazy by Bryce Morrison in 1996, and the Wild by David J. Fanning in 1987. By transplanting those individual, historically based opinions into this timeless Valhalla of “the best classical recordings,” the editorial process morphs those understandable differences in temperament and situation into internal inconsistencies.
In addition, as is always an issue with anthologies of this sort, there are problems of selection. Obviously, I haven’t read the whole book, but I did peruse the areas I know best. On the whole, the choice of what works and recordings to cover makes sense—and there’s generally good coverage of less-familiar music. Yes, the book is slightly Anglophile and strongly Eurocentric in spirit; but that’s to be expected from a magazine in which new recordings of Roy Harris and William Schuman symphonies are apt to be relegated to a special section that’s included only in copies marketed in North America. Still, even taking all of this into account, sometimes the decisions seem … well, surprising. To stick with Rachmaninoff for a moment: Suppose you want the Second Sonata and are not ready to plump for Shelley’s eight-CD compendium of the complete solo piano music. Where does the guide direct you? Well, it offers three recommendations (Glemser, Sudbin, and Matsuev), but none of them rate even a single star. Are we to conclude that the other 60 or so comparable recordings currently listed at ArkivMusic—including recordings by Cliburn, Grimaud, Horowitz, and Wild—are even
less
worthy? Why recommend a recording of the first three Scriabin symphonies and ignore
Prometheus
, a far more significant work that has been more widely recorded? Why steer readers to recordings of Prokofiev’s
On Guard for Peace
and
Semyon Kotko
, while leaving out the Eighth Piano Sonata? Do
both
Karajan recordings of the Mahler Ninth belong on a list of the top five or six for those who don’t want a complete set? And what can we make of a “Suggested Basic Library” where Janáček is represented solely by
The Cunning Little Vixen
or where Shostakovich’s Second Piano Concerto trumps his Fourth Symphony,
Lady Macbeth
, and the First Violin Concerto?
I shouldn’t belabor the point. After all, any such list will have its idiosyncrasies. Still, since this volume presents itself so self-confidently as the final word, the guide to “
the
best version” (emphasis added) of all these thousands of works, its quirks seem slightly less endearing than they would, say, in a signed essay.
As for accuracy: As with any book this size and complexity, there is a sprinkling of errors, but nothing that seriously interferes with the book’s usefulness. There is, though, one further question hovering over the project: Now that all of the back issues of
Gramophone
(except, of course, for that North American trivia) are available for free online, do we really need this condensed version? Perhaps if the
Gramophone
archive were easier to navigate (it’s still in beta), the guide would be superfluous; but as it stands now (March 2010), this book offers more reader-friendly access and more convenient browsing.
In the end, if you’re looking for lively personal debate or controversial ideas, if you’re looking for infectious advocacy for works you don’t know, this book won’t be of much interest. But if you want solid recommendations as you try out new works, you’ll find that it offers plenty of sensible advice.
Peter J. Rabinowitz
