| The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music 2010: The Key Classical Recordings on CD, DVD and SACD |  | Authors: Ivan March, Edward Greenfield, Robert Layton
Creator: Paul Czajkowski
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
List Price: $40.00
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Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 252,487
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1 Original
Pages: 1602
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3.6
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 6.9 x 2.1
ISBN: 0141041625
Dewey Decimal Number: 780.266
EAN: 9780141041629
ASIN: 0141041625
Publication Date: November 24, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
"Indispensible, illuminating, and comprehensive." --The Times (London)
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.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 9
 The record you are looking at isn't in the book June 6, 2010
K. Braithwaite (inkster, MI USA)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
The negative reviews here are pretty funny, and certainly pretty much right: the British bias. etc. But the real problem is this: unless you are looking at a record from a label that was big in the vinyl era with an artist who is a big name, the recording just isn't in this book. So what use is it?
 A useful reference April 12, 2010
Reuster (Missouri)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
As only a mid-level classical music fan, I have found this guide to be highly useful over the years as I have assembled a small library of recordings.
Not only have this guide's listing helped steer me toward better recordings, but also reading the listings has introduced me to the magic of all sorts of performers and conductors I was not previously aware of.
No doubt there are great recordings of things that are not listed in here, as the ongoing comparisons with the Gramophone Guide are happy to point out. That problem cuts both ways.
But if you are an average enthusiast of classical music like me, you can bet that any recording listed in here is going to be a worthy expenditure, and that means this book is money well spent.
Now if only they could make it into a web/iPhone app so a user could search for and easily find all recommended recordings by a certain performer, for example. And to have all that in my iPhone the next time I unexpectedly decide to start shopping...
 Modest improvement for 2010 and hundreds more listings than Gramophone's book February 9, 2010
Larry VanDeSande (Mason, Michigan United States)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
It's hard to argue a product with 200 fewer pages than its last edition in 2008 is improved but I am setting out to show why the Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music 2010 is marginally better than its last full edition -- The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music 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 -- 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 Gramophones monthly magazine -- Gramophone - Incls Monthly Gramophone Music Compilation CD-R -- 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 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 and is full of important information.
-- Third Ear Classical Music 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 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 book from way back in 1968 is still relevant today even though its more than four decades old 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 one cent.
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.
Rapidly becoming useless January 14, 2010
Jeff Brown (Portland, OR)
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
When I began searching for music to buy, I found the Penguin Guide useful, but that was 10 years ago. It gave good recommendations on the classics, but had relatively nothing on new recordings. Now that trend is to the extreme. I think my edition from 2003 is quite similar to this edition: all the same recordings are in here and very few new outstanding recordings are reviewed. Don't worry, I didn't waist my money on this edition, rather I found a copy at a bookstore and looked through it. And good grief is it expensive. Let me list several reasons why not to buy this book:
1. It is super expensive for the redundant content.
2. The scoring system seems to be somewhat random and inconsistent.
3. Not enought new recordings are included.
4. They only seem interested in record labels out of England.
There are multiple other options that are far superior to this tree killer such as the Grammaphone guide, classicstoday.com, your local record store, and finally amazon reviews. Don't waist your money here. Avoid at all costs!
 Will no longer buy the Penguin Guide January 9, 2010
baroquemusician (Mililani, Hawaii USA)
8 out of 12 found this review helpful
The Penguin guide used to be a great source for recording reviews. I've owned every volume since its beginning well over twenty five years ago and still have the original volumes that reviewed LP's. The last PG I purchased was the 2005/06 edition. No more. Over the years the PG has become repetitive and tired, the victim of its own "weight", so to speak. I now go to the internet for comprehensive reviews of classical performances. Amazon is a great resource. Music Web International(British) is another.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 9
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