- ISBN13: 9781848364769
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
Introduction Though few of them make much effort to entice a new audience to their product, the recording companies continue to pour out a flood of classical music. The catalogue of current classical CDs runs to more than two thousand tightly packed pages, and lists nearly three hundred composers before reaching the second letter of the alphabet. An average month sees some four hundred recordings added to the pile. THE ROUGH GUIDE to CLASSICAL MUSIC attempts to m… More >>
This book is invaluable for those who have a limited knowledge of classical music and want to expand their listening repertoire. The choice of composers is excellent – of course when the number is limited (200+), one can always gripe about the favourites that have been left out. The accounts are written in a lively, up-beat style which does not compromise the fidelity of the information and the major works are well chosen. Finally a couple of key recordings are recommended – they tend towards the conservative, but pretty much ensure that the new listener will not be disappointed.
I would certainly recommend this book above the NPR guide and other “beginners guides” I have seen. Testimony to that is the fact that my copy has fallen apart from overuse over the years and is now held together with rubber bands. Enjoy!
Rating: 5 / 5
Truly, all the ROUGH GUIDES are top notch! This beautifully designed book will give you not only the basic pieces of just about every leading composer through the present, but also picks the top CD performances. Plus there are short bios on leading players and conductors. Did you know there is a collection of about 94 CD’s by Toscanini, for example, (who, I did not know, lived in to his mid 90’s). Browsing thru, say, Mozart on Beethoven, you get a terrific rundown on their top pieces and performances, plus bios and place in musical history. Plus there are many relative unknowns who I never knew! One very small criticism..Where are the 2 American composers, Edward MacDowell, and Amy Beach? (Maybe in later editions. Mine is dated 1994).In sum, a very fine book, even with these monir flaws!
Rating: 5 / 5
This book I found to be an overall quick and easy reference book, there are of course more explicit and more informative books around, but this book is great for an overall view of a composer’s life and famous works. But there are several things that I must attend to in this review and that would be: I believe it would be really nice if instead of alphabetical order they would have catagorized them into their eras, but of course this would most likely be only appeasing to me or some other person who knows what eras they are in, so if you don’t know about eras etc. then this should not discourage you in any way. I also was rather disappointed that the author yeilded into only putting in their most famous works, which is fine and all, it just even more obscures some of the composer’s works of equal quality that have been placed in the back row. (ex: Mozart’s string quintets are very famous and I grant, excellent, but why is it that no one ever hears his string Duos and trios which are of equal greatness?) Again, nothing to discourage you from buying this book. But overall this book is a great reference source for novices and experts alike.
Rating: 4 / 5
This is a guide to recommended recordings of the basic classical repertory. Where books like The Penguin Guide present the available recordings and let you decide, this guide, like those by Ted Libbey and Jim Svejda, offers you one or two of the authors’ choices for the best record and the reasons why they chose it. So it’s like movie criticism, except a lot more useful and applicable to the consumer – we go to the movies to be entertained, but classical music is by contrast all very serious and important (right?), so that finding the most important recordings of the basic repertory is essential for the record collector.
Of the three books this one is the least to my liking – I disagree with a lot of the choices here. The authors seem to coming from a musicological angle rather than from an interpretive angle: the guide reads more like music history than criticism. I’ve learned a lot more from the books by Libbey and Svejda, writers who seem to have a more comprehensive knowledge of the classical recording scene, its history and important trends and accomplishments.
Even so, it’s useful to have another opinion, and this book does by far the best job with contemporary composers. (The music-history approach does serve the contemporary “classical” scene pretty well, if nothing else.)
If you’re really serious about collecting classical music on record, I’d get ahold of all three books… but this one last.
Rating: 3 / 5
I’ll start off by saying that I’m not rating this book based on it’s CD recommendations. My knowledge of all the recorded versions of any particular composition is not vast enough for that critique.
However the biographies are excellent; Well written and intriguing within the concise bounds required by this format.
If fact you will probably read about and become interested in many composers that you know little about.
Rating: 5 / 5