Awards 2011 - Opera

Donizetti: Linda di Chamounix
Eglise Gutiérrez et al; Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden/Mark Elder
Opera Rara

Mark Elder conducted last year's Opera winner, the Hallé's Götterdämmerung, and he returns with an opera that, according to Joel Kasow in Fanfare, "has far too long been relegated to minor status". Also in Fanfare, Henry Fogel notes that "This is a very tricky opera to get right, because it has elements of serious and comic operas blended into a form known as opera semiseria. If either element is blown out of proportion or minimized, the opera loses its balance... Elder is just about perfect". Fogel describes lead soprano Eglise Gutiérrez's work as "a truly sensational performance in every way". In BBC Music Magazine, Michael Tanner tells us that "All the singers are up to their roles, and the playing of the orchestra is bold; even the most conventional passages sweep you along... It's hard to imagine this set ever being replaced, or even rivalled".

Runners-up:
Martin: Der Sturm
Robert Holl et al; Netherlands Radio Philharmonic/Thierry Fischer
Hyperion

Bartók: Bluebeard's Castle
Laszló Polgár; Ildikó Komlósi; Budapest Festival Orchestra/Iván Fischer
Channel Classics

Rossini: Ermione
Carmen Giannattasio et al; London Philharmonic Orchestra/David Parry
Opera Rara

Beethoven: Fidelio
Nina Stemme et al; Lucerne Festival Orchestra/Claudio Abbado
DG

A second appearance for Opera Rara in this category, and Hyperion scores a success with a rare venture into opera. DG is, for the third year in a row, the sole major label presence, but then the majors do have those massive back catalogues. The Bartók is another one of those reissues-that-kind-of-aren't-reissues, having first been released by Philips. Perhaps the most intriguing thing about this category is an absence: René Jacobs's recording of The Magic Flute got the highest bonus scores from foreign-language press - which is to say, continental Europe adored it - but neither IRR nor Classics Today was impressed. Of course this brings up the fact that if I had a slightly different way of calculating scores, it might have even won the Award. But it feels "right" that it should place just outside the top 5, which is essentially what these Awards are trying to reflect - a general feeling about how the year's reviews went, rather than a scientific description.

Awards 2011 - Opera recital

"Diva Divo"
Joyce DiDonato; Orchestre De L'Opéra National De Lyon/Kazuko Ono
Virgin

Clearly it wasn't enough for Joyce DiDonato to win last year's Award for Opera recital, because here she is again. And obviously that wasn't enough either, because she also appears as a soloist on this year's winning Choral album. Oh and that still wasn't enough, because "Diva Divo" - a selection of "trouser roles" and, uh, "skirt roles" - is also the Recording of the Year, the best-reviewed of them all. "Joyce DiDonato is surely one of the best American opera singers to emerge in recent years. Hers is a rich yet smooth lyrical mezzo... She is also as fine a vocal actress as you'll find in opera today", says Kurt Moses in ARG. "Perhaps the best thing about this recital", Robert Levine tells us on Classics Today, "is that everything DiDonato sings sounds spontaneous, as if the character - her- or himself - were actually experiencing it for the first time. Being an American, I'd like to chalk this up to her Yankee pluckiness, but it's really something else: She's a great artist".

Runners-up:
"Verismo Arias"
Jonas Kaufmann; Orchestra dell'Accademia di Santa Cecilia/Antonio Pappano
Decca

"The Italian Tenor"
Vittorio Grigolo; Orchestra del Teatro Regio di Parma/Pier Giorgio Morandi
Sony

"The Maltese Tenor"
Joseph Calleja; L'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande/Marco Armiliato
Decca

"Great Baritone Arias"
Peter Mattei; Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra/Lawrence Renes
BIS

There were only 17 entries in this category, compared with about 110 in Orchestral, about 75 in Solo vocal, and over 40 in Opera. So is it that opera aria discs are a small niche market, or that there aren't very many singers out there willing and/or able to record a recital? Hardly the former, seeing as there's plenty of money to be made in a well-marketed star singer. What's also interesting is that you don't have to go very far down the list of entries before you find an album that's regarded, on balance, as a bit meh. Opera critics are a critical bunch indeed, with very particular standards. They say things like "I haven't heard Berlioz's "Premiers transports" sung this beautifully since Gladys Swarthout did it with Toscanini back in 1947" (which is how Lynn René Bayley praised Joyce DiDonato in Fanfare).

Awards 2011 - Living composer - Instrumental

"Chinese Recorder Concertos: East Meets West"
Michala Petri; Copenhagen Philharmonic/Lan Shui
OUR Recordings

A warm welcome please to OUR Recordings, the label created 5 years ago by Danish musicians Michala Petri and Lars Hannibal. Fanfare's Raymond Tuttle says this "is, to enlist a perhaps overused word, delightful, and deserves to be brought to the attention of a broad audience". ARG's Todd Gorman tells us "This music speaks a language that communicates like little else I have heard lately". Tuttle: "If you don't believe me, try the opening work by Tang Jianping... This will go to the top of my list of musical pick-me-ups". Gorman: "Tang's piece ranks with the most interesting music I have ever heard". Tuttle: "If anyone still doubts the recorder's place as an instrument worthy of the same attention as its cousin the flute, Petri's playing here should put that to rest". Gorman: "As for Petri's playing, pick the superlatives of your choice; they should all apply". Classics Today's David Hurwitz: "This is beautiful music, often astoundingly so... an absolute joy from start to finish".

Runners-up:
Tiensuu: Vie; Missa; False Memories I-III
Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra/John Storgårds; Kari Kriikku
Ondine

"Sound the Bells! American Premieres for Brass"
The Bay Brass
Harmonia Mundi

Frank: Hilos and other works
ALIAS Chamber Ensemble; Gabriela Lena Frank
Naxos

Gallagher: Orchestral music
London Symphony Orchestra/JoAnn Falletta
Naxos

This is one of the least predictable of all the categories, given the sometimes haphazard coverage of contemporary music by our review sources. Aside from any editorial considerations about how much of such music to include, there's also some regional bias - American music's not so often reviewed in the British publications, or perhaps another way of saying this is that ARG and Fanfare tend to have better coverage of contemporary music. They and Classics Today reviewed all 5 of our discs here; Gramophone and IRR managed 2 each, and BBC Music Magazine did 1. And then, of course, because the music is unfamiliar, the reviewer must offer an opinion on the music more than the performances, which isn't a situation you find with, say, Beethoven - "this Fifth Symphony is quite an uninteresting work, but at least the performers seem committed...". So the unfortunate reviewer must usually start from square one as regards knowing what to think about the album at hand. One occasion where an earlier recording of the music was available possibly the most divisive album of the year: the Chandos release of Steve Reich's Desert Music and Three Movements got top marks from both BBC Music Magazine and Fanfare, but bottom marks from both Gramophone and ARG.

Awards 2011 - Living composer - Vocal

Sven-David Sandström: "Nordic Sounds"
Swedish Radio Choir/Peter Dijkstra
Channel Classics

"The title of this superb disc is the only banal thing about it", says Martin Anderson in IRR. "the music, performances and recording are all phenomenally good. Happy the composer that has this kind of choir at his disposal... The singing... will leave you slack-jawed in amazement: control of pitch, dynamic, rhyth, blend, you name it, is perfect". On Classics Today, David Vernier calls Sandstrom an "original composer uninhibited by conventional views on what singers can or can't do. Of course, when you have a virtuoso ensemble like the Swedish Radio Choir performing your music, what's to worry?" He also notes "Although there are many moments that will stretch the familiar boundaries of comfort for a casual listener, there's nothing here that's gratuituously irritating, and there are some pieces - Es ist genug; A new song of love; Agnus Dei - that will literally prime you with the familiar while launching you headlong into the experience of choral music's newest frontier".

Runners-up:
Miškinis: "Time is Endless"
Royal Holloway Choir/Rupert Gough
Hyperion

Penderecki: Credo; Cantata for Jagellonian University
Soloists' Warsaw Boys' Choir; Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra & Choir/Antoni Wit
Naxos

"Beyond All Mortal Dreams: American A Cappella"
Trinity College Choir, Cambridge/Stephen Layton
Hyperion

Dennehy: Grá agus Bás; That the Night Come
Iarla O’Lionáird; Dawn Upshaw; Crash Ensemble/Alan Pierson
Nonesuch

This category had fewer than half as many entries as its instrumental counterpart, but noticeably better coverage by the British magazines. Again, a hard one always to predict, but it would be an odd Awards indeed if there wasn't at least one entry from Hyperion. Nice this year to see some Irish representation.

Awards 2011 - Archive

Mahler: Symphony no.10 - 1960 BBC broadcast (including lecture) & 1964 Proms premiere
Deryck Cooke; Philharmonia Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra/Bertholdt Goldschmidt
Testament

"This is more than just a performance", Gramophone's James Inverne explains. "... It is a historic document and a fascinating insight into a major work's excavation". His colleague David Gutman warns of "plenty of rough moments" but these "may or may not matter to you given the obvious fervour of the music-making". In IRR, Robert Matthew-Walker, noting that the 1960 performance came "in the days when the BBC was the BBC", says that "The result is akin to being witness to the first performance of The Rite of Spring, of Elgar's First Symphony, or of Verklärte Nacht: this is an issue of major importance, the significance of which could not be exaggerated. I cannot recommend it too highly". Well, actually, Robert, you could have given it an IRR Outstanding accolade. Meanwhile, Fanfare's Christopher Abbot calls it "the Dead Sea Scrolls for Mahlerites".

Runners-up:
Wagner, Strauss: Lieder and scenes
Kirsten Flagstad; Orchestra of the Städtische Oper Berlin/Georges Sebastian (1952)
Audite

Wagner: Der Ring des Nibelungen
Hans Hotter et al; Orchester der Bayreuther Festspiele/Clemens Krauss (1953)
Orfeo

Berlioz: Les nuits d'été; Handel: Arias
Lorraine Hunt Lieberson; Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Nicholas McGegan (1995, 1991)
Philharmonia Baroque

Mahler: Symphony no.8
soloists; choirs; London Philharmonic Orchestra/Klaus Tennstedt (1991)
LPO

You'll notice I've avoided the term "Historical" in this category to allow for performances of more recent vintage, though I haven't yet figured out where exactly is the line between an archive release and an ordinary release that happens to be a few years old. The original thinking for not including historical releases was that I didn't have much interest in them myself, but by expanding the definition to "archive" generally, things get more interesting, though I can't imagine I'll ever be the sort of person who must have every Toscanini performance ever. With the addition of this category and the next, the awards pretty much cover anything that gets released. Maybe soon I'll start to include DVD and Blu-ray.

Awards 2011 - Reissue

Liszt: Complete piano music
Leslie Howard
Hyperion

It would be nice to think that it was a foregone conclusion that Leslie Howard's immense and, let's face it, slightly insane project to record all of Liszt's piano music would win this award, but of course it's the nature of the Nereffid's Guide Awards that each release is judged in isolation on its own merits rather than on the basis of whether it is more deserving than others. But we needn't have worried. Noting that "Howard's abilities as a writer and investigative musicologist were essential to the series", James Harrington in ARG says "If all Liszt performances were as meticulously prepared as Howard's, we would cease to have Liszt detractors". What, do we still have Liszt detractors? I pity the fools. If you can't afford the 99-disc box you can pick and choose tracks on Hyperion's web site, which prompts the somewhat disturbing reflection that the first album in the series was released in 1985, a good 5 years before Tim Berners-Lee mooted the idea of the World Wide Web.

Runners-up:
"French Music"
various orchestras/Thomas Beecham
EMI

Lou Harrison: Music for orchestra, ensemble and gamelan
various artists; Gamelan Si Betty; Brooklyn Philharmonic/Dennis Russell Davies
Nimbus

"Complete EMI Recordings"
Alicia de Larrocha
EMI

"Complete 78-rpm Solo Recordings"
Percy Grainger
APR

OK, that answers that question then: when I created this category I wasn't at all sure what I'd end up with - would it be dominated by labels like Newton and Australian Eloquence, or what? Clearly box sets are the ones that find favour. Part of this is because of the somewhat haphazard way in which what you might call "mainstream" rereleases - things like Hyperion's budget Helios label and the major labels' opera repackagings - are treated by the review sources. Impressively proportioned box sets are more likely to get reviewed. It's nice to see Percy Grainger making an appearance in his anniversary year (and Chandos's Grainger Edition wasn't far off the pace), and as someone who's only now dipping a toe in the "focus on the performer, not the music" side of collecting, I'm glad to acknowledge EMI's churning out of large chunks of its archives. The Lou Harrison release sticks out a bit from this crowd: it's a straight reissue of four albums originally on the MusicMasters label.

Awards 2011 - What it all means

How it's made

For the 7 major review sources - as mentioned above - each disc gets a score out of 5 based on either the review's own provided score or my interpretation of the review; when MusicWeb and Fanfare provide multiple reviews of one release, I go with the best review, though the other reviews do figure in the final calculation of the overall score. The average is weighted to reflect the fact that the number of reviews varies from album to album (for my purposes, I've assumed that not being reviewed is very slightly worse than getting an average review). Then I do the same for the 3 minor sources - Klassik Heute, Audiophile Audition, and Classics Today France - all of which have a numerical score to make things easier for me (and avoid me struggling with foreign languages). And finally, bonus points go to those albums that are given a "discs-of-the-month" equivalent in the various continental magazines (obtained via their web sites) and the quarterly German Critics' Prize. Any release that was reviewed by 3 or more of the 7 major review sources goes on the long list, at which point I assign categories and eliminate anything released too late or too early. This year, the release period was from August 2010 to July 2011. There's a big lull in releases in July so it makes a natural cutoff point. Unfortunately I have to wait till January to ensure full coverage from Fanfare and ARG.

Some statistics
The long list (albums reviewed by 3 out of 7 major sources) comprised 1,542 albums and involved 7,967 different opinions. There were about 7,700 other albums not in consideration! (This is rather more than a year's worth of reviews - it stretches from September 2010 magazine issues to January 2012 issues).
The average score for an album on the long list was 4.09, which essentially means that, among releases that gain attention from several sources, the average album is a good album.
Gramophone, IRR, ARG, Fanfare, and MusicWeb each reviewed roughly 1,000-1,100 of the 1,542 long-list albums; BBC Music Mag managed nearly 700, while Classics Today covered just 388. You might wonder why the latter qualifies as a "major review source" in that case; well, record labels do like to make use of the "10/10" symbol.
78 albums were reviewed by all 7 major review sources; 7 of the 16 Award winners were.
3 albums were reviewed by all 7 major review sources plus all 3 minor sources and got at least 3 bonus accolades: Vadim Gluzman's Bruch, Pierre-Laurent Aimard's Ravel concertos album, and Gustavo Dudamel's "Tchaikovsky Shakespeare", although the latter 2 were not in contention, having each received at least one negative review (yes, from ARG in both cases!).
Some 38 albums received a top accolade from one source and a wholly negative (score of 1) review from another. In 16 cases, ARG provided the negative, while Fanfare accounted for 11. Classics Today France accounted for 8. The other sources tend not to give scores of 1.
Actually Dudamel is an interesting case. From the 7 major sources he got 8 reviews (2 in Fanfare): one 4.5, one 4, two 3s, two 2s, and two 1s. But he also got top scores from Luister and Scherzo as well as the German Critics' Prize.

The labels
Harmonia Mundi, Hyperion, and Virgin each won 2 awards.
Hyperion had an impressive 11 winners or runners-up, while Harmonia Mundi had 8. Universal (ie, Decca and DG) had 6; EMI (including Virgin) had 8; Sony had 2; Warner had 1 (on Nonesuch). Equally impressive, Hyperion appeared in 9 of the 16 categories, and Harmonia Mundi in 7. So perhaps for classical music we should redefine the term "major label".

And in conclusion
This year I made as much effort as possible to keep myself in the dark about what the final results might be. Perhaps this extra intrigue contributed to my feeling that this year's field was an impressive one. In all categories (except for Opera recital) we could produce a very convincing top 10, or 15, or even 20.
Adding the foreign-language "bonus points" proved very instructive, not just in sometimes highlighting differences or blind spots but also in sometimes providing reinforcement for my main review sources. As always, the ultimate point of the exercise is to provide some sort of quantitative impression of one person's qualitative experience of trying to find out what classical albums are really worth buying.
You should never trust a single critic, but put a bunch of 'em together and they seem to make sense.
Now go buy stuff.

Meanwhile, at 36,000 feet...

Where can you hear Saariaho's L'amour de loin, Ligeti's string quartets, the viola music of Quincy Porter, Philippe Jaroussky singing Caldara, Stephen Hough playing Chopin, Tennstedt's Nereffid's Guide Award-winning Mahler 2, and many, many more? On an Aer Lingus flight from Dublin to New York, as it happens. I discovered this last month, and hadn't flown for a year and a half before that, so I don't know how long it's been going on. But hurrah! When they first introduced individual in-flight entertainment the classical selection wasn't much good - a few generic "Best of Beethoven" sort of things. Those are still there, but there's now about fifty "proper" classical albums available too. I don't know how often they change them, though most of the albums seemed to be at most a couple of years old, many of them less than that. One little obscurity I was delighted to find was an album of Fritz Reizenstein's piano music played by Philip Martin, which included his Variations on the Lambeth Walk. Oi!

Now, I must point out that my joy at discovering so much high-quality and/or interesting music on the flight does not mean that I endorse the concept of flying. But I will concede that any mode of transport that allows one to listen to Joan Sutherland and Steve Reich, not to mention play (and, ahem, win) Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and watch Game of Thrones, can't be all bad.


Nereffid accidentally selects the wrong album.

Who'd be a pianist?

From Jeremy Nicholas's review in Gramophone a few months ago of a recital by Francesco Piemontesi on Avanti:

[the Bach/Liszt Fantasia and Fugue is] efficiently executed, cogently voiced but pallid compared with Percy Grainger's exuberance and sonority in 1931.

Who would want a job where, every so often when you've completed some work, someone leans over your shoulder and says, "Not bad, but this other person did a much better job eighty years ago"?

Arnold con moto

On a whim I'm listening to just those tracks in my music library that have a "con moto" marking.
Turns out Malcolm Arnold used that a lot.

This should have been posted on Facebook or something, shouldn't it?

And why do my first posts after a long break tend to be really trivial?

I am making history

Part 1 of A History of Classical Music through Recordings is now up on musicisgood.org. It's about Gregorian chant. The introductory post in which I attempt to justify my existence is also up.
I'm currently working on part 2, which brings in polyphony, and parts 3 to 5 have been mapped out. In the introduction I note that 1001 Classical Recordings You Must Hear Before You Die doesn't cover early music very well. I'm pleased to note that their (chronologically) first album, of the (original) Carmina Burana, corresponds to my nineteenth. And still I occasionally feel bad about only scratching the surface.
I know way more about early music than I did a few weeks ago. Maybe you will too!
8tracks mix to follow soon, hopefully. It's my ambition to own all the recordings I discuss (makes it easier to discuss them, eh?), so there could be a steady stream of mixes. I intend this to be something I'm very proud of.

A Gramophone review survey

Got an email from Gramophone telling me they want to improve their online review archive. No surprise there. The old Gramofile was very useful, but the new version, which relies on accurate OCR'ing of scanned issues, is haphazard, and removing the ability to browse the PDFs didn't help either. If they can get the thing working properly it will be a great resource.
So the accompanying survey seems interesting. One question asks,

If you were looking to read a review of a specific recording on the Gramophone.co.uk Reviews Archive, how would you go about searching for it? Which criteria would you look for first? What would you look for next?

And then I get to pick various criteria from a list (Composer, Conductor, Date of recording, and so forth) and arrange them in a suitable order. Then there's

The following is a list of information which could appear alongside a classical music review. In your view, which of these are essential, which are nice to have and which are not required?

and we get things like "More from this composer", "Reader rating", "Playing time", "Reviewer name" and many more besides.
Some thought went into this, obviously. So much better than seems to be the usual approach (see eMusic for example), which is "Dear customer, We have just completely fucked up our web site. Isn't it great?!"

The integrity of Fanfare

Lately, Norman Lebrecht flung a cat among the pigeons with an article titled "How to buy a record review", in which he offered an exposé of unethical goings-on at Fanfare:

When Fanfare receives a copy of your CD, it asks you to take an advert ‘at special rates’. The bigger the ad, the larger the coverage. No ad, no guaranteed review. Simple as that.

This is accompanied by a copy of the letter that Fanfare editor Joel Flegler sends to the artists or labels. You can read some of the responses from Fanfare readers and contributors, as well as some labels and artists, and some outraged voices, below Lebrecht's article and also on the Classical Music Guide Forums.
Seeing as the Nereffid's Guide Awards, and my CD buying habits, depend on Fanfare and all other review sources having some integrity, am I shocked/disturbed/etc? Not really. You don't have to be an investigative journalist of Lebrecht's calibre (ahem) to notice that Fanfare's features section tends to have lots of adverts for the CDs whose artists are interviewed. I'd always assumed there was some sort of relationship between the interviews/reviews and the ads but didn't know exactly what it was. And of course the artists or labels tended to be toward the obscure or lesser-known end of the scale - it's not like they were chatting to a Gergiev or Domingo every issue - so, again, I figured the editorial decisions weren't based on how much of a draw the interviewees would be to readers. But, yes, I had noticed that the reviews accompanying the interviews were generally very positive. The ethical problem basically hinges on this sentence from Flegler's letter:

If you decide to accept the proposal, I won’t proceed with any aspect of it unless I find a critic who’s receptive to your CD.

To those opposed to the practice, this constitutes clear evidence that Fanfare is selling good reviews. But nobody seems prepared to go that step further and accuse its reviewers of being crooks, presumably because nobody actually believes that they are. My own thoughts on the whole affair are that it's an unfortunate practice but one that's probably necessary for the magazine's survival. As I said, the fact that the interviewees are also the advertisers is blindingly obvious, seeing as both are coralled in the same part of the magazine, which can be safely ignored if you wish (I for one rarely read the interviews). It might be appropriate if a brief editorial note made it clear what was going on. There's no indication that anything in the main reviews section is "for sale".
And now for the bit where we use science to address ethical dilemmas. Sam Harris would be so proud! Seeing as I keep records of all the reviews, I can tell you exactly how morally dubious Advertgate is. Every review I read gets a score from 1 to 5, where 5 is "outstanding" (the equivalent of a Gramophone Editor's Choice or a Classics Today 10/10) and 1 is garbage; 4.5 is "very good"; 4 is "good"; 3.5 is "good but..."; 3 is "OK, bad points roughly balanced with good"; 2 is "poor but...". Obviously these are based on my subjective assessment, but I try to be consistent in my interpretations.
Overall, if you discount "Hall of Fame" articles, Fanfare gives a CD an average score of 3.95 (that's based on the last 6 issues). But the average for "paid for" feature reviews is 4.18, while the average for reviews in the main section is 3.92. So there's a significant difference all right. In those 6 issues there were 312 reviews in the features section (in many cases, the same disc was reviewed by 2 or more people), while there were 2,388 reviews in the main section. Interestingly, I've marked 3 apparently paid-for reviews that gave a score of 1, meaning the reviewer regarded the album as rubbish, plus 2 that gave a 2; in these cases, there was either another, more positive, review or a positive review of another disc by the same artist. So not every reviewer is receptive. But, as you might expect, the reviews are largely positive: about 50% have a score of 4; 35% have 4.5; and 7% get a 5, meaning a rave. The comparative figures for the main reviews section are, respectively, 44%, 27%, and 3%. I wasn't actually expecting that last one to be so small compared with the "paid-for" figure: it shows a clear benefit of going with a "receptive" reviewer, as such reviewers seem far more likely to be wildly enthusiastic about a release. But Jerry Dubins, one of Fanfare's most distinctive voices, sheds more light on this in a response to Lebrecht and moves things further out of the ethical grey area:

The review is written first, and if it happens to be an especially glowing one, only then is the artitst offered the opportunity to advertise and be interviewed. If the artist accepts, great; then the magazine makes some money, and the artitst gets extra exposure in the form of an interview to go along with the already positive review. If the artist declines…and this is the notion it’s really important for readers to be dsabused of…the glowing review, which was already written, still gets published.

I can also compare Fanfare's average review scores with other sources that don't use star ratings or marks out of 5 or 10. Its 3.95 compares with 3.85 for American Record Guide and 4.1 for International Record Review; unfortunately I don't have Gramophone figures yet. So you might say that, on average, an album will be slightly more favourably received in IRR than in Fanfare. But of course IRR reviews far fewer discs than Fanfare - about 1,500 in the past year - so there has to be rather more editorial winnowing-out. An editor deciding that a disc isn't worth reviewing is a whole other kettle of ethical fish, and Divine Art's Stephen Sutton had this to say as part of his response to Lebrecht:

Without checking and from the top of my head I reckon that around 75% of our releases (averaging 40 a year) are reviewed in Fanfare, and only about 5% in BBC Music and Gramophone; we are lucky to get one review a year in BBC Music – and our advertising budget for all three is about the same

So I'm not worried that the Nereffid's Guide Awards are being corrupted by Joel Flegler's attempts to keep his magazine going. If anything, we can be thankful that Fanfare is bringing attention to new releases and artists that might otherwise be ignored. And of course albums that are otherwise ignored won't be making an appearance in the final shortlist anyway!

Montserrat Figueras

Montserrat Figueras has died aged 69 years. She and husband Jordi Savall have enriched the world of early music for a long time.
The music below is the Portuguese song "Senhora del Mundo", recorded as part of their album Francisco Javier: Route to the Orient, one of my favourite albums of recent years.



Added, Nov 24:
Blimey. Site traffic increased 16-fold because of this post. Hello new visitor!

A redesign of Gramophone

Back in May 2010 I posted these words:

The thing about Gramophone is, if it didn't exist, would it be necessary to invent it? Reputation aside, the answer has to be no, largely because of the existence of BBC Music Magazine, upon whose general style Gramophone has been gradually converging in recent years.

And now: a "new look" Gramophone! Obviously I am the only person in the world to have had the above thoughts, so you can thank me for single-handedly prompting the magazine's changes. All that bothers me is it took them more than a year to do exactly as I told them.
Actually it hasn't changed hugely, but Gramophone does seem to have refocused itself. Gone is the news section, which was increasingly indistinguishable from its equivalent in BBC Music Magazine, and the letters have been shoved to the back out of the way. Gone too are the columnists, which were at best a hit-and-miss business. And hurrah, "The Trial" has been adjourned; it always seemed an odd idea, that a magazine trading on its reputation for excellent reviewers would run a monthly feature highlighting the possibility that any one of them could be monstrously wrong. Unfortunately the invariably dull "My Music" remains (though hopefully it will never return to last issue's nadir, in which Beethoven fan Jon Voight moaned about how the civil rights movement was a cover for thugs and commies). The artist-related news/bumf in the front section remains, but it will be interesting to see how the features section progresses: this time, we get a decently long article on Naive's Vivaldi Edition and a reasonably substantial one on Jordi Savall. No "composers and their dogs" nonsense here.
Then come the reviews, which we are told "can run to greater length if needed", although they often seem rather too short, especially for those of us who plough through Fanfare every couple of months. And we are also informed that the "esteemed panel of reviewers are even more central", which appears to mean nothing other than the fact that the header of each review section is accompanied by some staggeringly unflattering images of a pair of reviewers. It's like the sketch artist's just come back from the trial of a paedophile ring.
Next comes "The Specialist's Guide To...", which is a good excuse to highlight some niche areas (this month, rare French operas; next month, pianist Paul Jacobs). Finally comes The Gramophone Collection, which is still the same as ever. Oh, no, not finally, there's the Musical Journeys thing and the hi-fi section. No "Tune surfing": a nation weeps.
So, is it an improvement? Yes, it's an improvement, if only in terms of Gramophone no longer being BBC Music Magazine's pompous uncle. It does feel rather different from that magazine again, and I appreciate the direction James Inverne seems to be trying to take. We'll wait and see how future issues go.

Almost the return of Nereffid's Guide

My contributions to musicisgood.org now number two, both of them filed under "Classical highlights". The first provides short quotes excerpted from the reviews of the best-received discs in the September/October 2011 issue of Fanfare, while the second does the same for American Record Guide. I intend to do this for all future issues, and for Gramophone, BBC Music Magazine, and International Record Review.
So, the venue and the format may have changed, but I seem to be back where I started five years ago, when I first created an eMusic List highlighting what was in the latest issue of Gramophone. Some good things sprang from that initial attempt - not least of them the Nereffid's Guide Awards, soon to make its fifth appearance - so who knows what might emerge from musicisgood?
It's ironic, too, that this harking back to the olden days comes when it does: I fell out of love with eMusic when the site drew down the ire of its customers over adding Sony products; and at the moment there's yet more rage, this time as the company rolls out a completely new design that it seems to have forgotten to beta-test, or perhaps even alpha-test. This is all to "enhance your music discovery", apparently, although it seems to have involved removing pretty much all the tools that people used to find music and replacing them with adverts for editorial content. In the past I would say "ah well, at least the downloads are cheap" but at the moment I'm afraid to download anything because chances are it won't work but I could still be charged. At the moment eMusic seems to be nothing but a good-looking corpse, and even the "good-looking" bit is arguable.

8tracks mix: Awards 2010, part VII

November? Seriously? Ah well, here it is at last - the two Living Composer categories. Refresh your memory of the awards here. Now sit tight and wait for the 2011 awards!

The EMI takeover by Universal

So, what does it mean for classical music that Universal now owns EMI's catalogue? Well, the first thing is that the regulators may get involved, given the market share that Universal could have in some countries - it would be close to 40 percent worldwide, and much higher in certain places. But let's say Universal gets to keep the full classical catalogue it's acquired. There's two aspects here - reissues and new recordings. At present, Universal seems happy to keep Decca and DG as separate units, so perhaps the same will hold true for EMI and Virgin and there won't be much impact on artist signings or releases. The reissues situation may be rather different though, both good and bad. Efforts such as DG's recent Mahler edition show the value of pooling catalogues, but on the other hand, how many recordings of identical repertoire will Universal want to keep in circulation? And now the recent copyright extension comes into play, because nothing's going to out of copyright for another twenty years, and Universal is sitting on 40 percent of it all. (Wow! It's almost as if European lawmakers didn't properly think of the consequences of their actions!)
So there's a massive opportunity here for consumers to get royally shafted. My guess is that there probably won't be much change overall and we'll continue to experience the exasparating mix of great bargain box sets and completely unavailable recordings. But oh, the potential for something wonderful is so great. If it were up to me, I'd just go completely bananas on downloads and put every damn thing online. Get World Heritage status for it, even.

Incidentally, a quick look at my own collection indicates that, combined, Universal and EMI account for 25 percent of the total. Sony and Warner together make up another 8 percent. This is, I imagine, rather low for a typical classical collection and reflects how my purchasing has been shaped by cheap downloads from independent labels on eMusic.

Introducing Stephen J. Nereffid

So, musicisgood.org is now up and running, and the honour of writing the first post (after the original "welcome" notice) falls to one Stephen J. Nereffid.
Who? Well there was some discussion about what names we would be writing under. After all, we tend to know each other by our emusers or emusic nicknames, but these aren't necessarily appropriate for a blog that wants to be taken seriously. So we seem to have settled on real names or name-like pseudonyms. I thought about using my real name but by now the name Nereffid is so wedded to that part of my life that I couldn't part with it. Things like the Nereffid's Guide Awards would no longer make sense (and yes, I'll be writing about them on musicisgood as well as here next year). So Nereffid needed a first name, or maybe a pair of initials. Somehow the name "Stephen J. Nereffid" appeared in my brain early on in the thought process and refused to leave. I have no idea where it came from. Maybe it was a subconscious homage to Stephen J. Cannell. Maybe now I will have to finish every blog post by casting a sheet of paper into the air.

Thoughts for a history of classical music

So the suggestion that participants on the emusers.org message board should create a collective music blog prompts me to wonder about what I might contribute. Inevitably, grandiose schemes push small practical ideas out of the way. But which folly to embrace? Certainly it has to involve recommending recordings, but I run the risk of just repeating the Penguin Guide and similar publications. I want the recommendations to be pointers rather than definitive "best recordings", but what exactly would they be pointing to? Perhaps this could be aimed at the novice, or those with idle curiosity about music they've never heard before.
So it's some sort of Classical Music 101, but how to organise it? As I look at my shelves I see I have two kinds of books for exploring: CD guides, and histories or encyclopedias of music. What I don't have is something that combines the two. Well, I do have one book: the slightly oddly titled Music and Western Man, which arose from a series of radio programmes produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1955. The book comprises 49 chapters over about 320 pages, a chronology of music that begins with a pair of hymns to Apollo and ends with Shostakovich's tenth symphony; each chapter corresponds to the contents of each programme, with - and this is the crucial bit from my point of view - references to the recordings played.
The idea, then, is some kind of history of classical music - although reading the introduction to Richard Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music I am admonished that it would be a mere survey, not an actual history - with plenty of appropriate suggestions for recordings. Because the medium is a blog, it can be done in a modular fashion, going as specific or as broad as I feel the need at any point. So part 1 could be chant, part 2 Hildegard of Bingen, part 3 the troubadours, and so on. The text doesn't have to be too detailed - why compete with Wikipedia? Each bit would come with maybe five or six suggestions for recordings, drawn either from my own ideas or from other sources. Perhaps there could even be an 8tracks mix.
Now to the drawing board.