The Record Guide was an English reference work that listed, described, and evaluated gramophone recordings of classical music in the 1950s. It was a precursor to modern guides such as The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music .
The Record Guide was an English reference work that listed, described, and evaluated gramophone recordings of classical music in the 1950s. It was a precursor to modern guides such as The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music .
The guide was conceived and written by Edward Sackville-West and the music critic Desmond Shawe-Taylor. Their aim, as set out in the preface to the first edition in 1951, was "to try to supply a guide-book to the vast available repertory of the gramophone". The book ran to 763 pages, but nevertheless confined its coverage to records available in Britain in the domestic catalogues up to and including December, 1950. A reviewer wrote of the first edition: "It is not an encyclopaedia … for the principle of it is selective rather than comprehensive. We cannot, therefore, fairly charge the authors with omissions other than those which are inadvertent. The point is made with subtlety in the introduction. 'Inadvertent omissions there are bound to be, in spite of every effort to avoid them but it should not be assumed by the reader that an unquoted record has been simply overlooked. It is much more likely to have been excluded deliberately.'" [1]
The book considers recordings in alphabetical order of composer. Each composer section begins with an introduction assessing and describing the composer's works, after which the recordings are described and evaluated, using a star system, with two stars as the top rating. Of the introductions, the reviewer of The Gramophone wrote, "these paragraphs vary from a few lines to a couple of pages (the length being unrelated to the importance of the composer) and anyone unfamiliar with the authors would not have to read far before realising that two exceptionally intelligent musical minds had been at work." [1]
To the keep the guide current, Sackville-West and Shawe-Taylor produced interim updates, The Record Year in 1952 and 1953. At this time the long playing record was being introduced, but records were also being issued in the old 78 r.p.m. format. By 1955 the number of new releases threatened to overwhelm the authors, who recruited two younger colleagues to help them, Andrew Porter and William Mann. Between them they produced a full new edition of The Record Guide in 1955, running to 957 pages, [2] and a final supplement in 1956.
Four years after the last in the series of The Record Guide was published, three young musical writers emulated its layout and modus operandi in The Stereo Record Guide, which has evolved into The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music .
The Curlew is a song cycle by Peter Warlock on poems by W. B. Yeats. It is generally considered one of the composer's finest works.
Edward Elgar's Cello Concerto in E minor, Op. 85, his last major completed work, is a cornerstone of the solo cello repertoire. Elgar composed it in the aftermath of the First World War, when his music had already become out of fashion with the concert-going public. In contrast with Elgar's earlier Violin Concerto, which is lyrical and passionate, the Cello Concerto is for the most part contemplative and elegiac.
The Dream of Gerontius, Op. 38, is a work for voices and orchestra in two parts composed by Edward Elgar in 1900, to text from the poem by John Henry Newman. It relates the journey of a pious man's soul from his deathbed to his judgment before God and settling into Purgatory. Elgar disapproved of the use of the term "oratorio" for the work, though his wishes are not always followed. The piece is widely regarded as Elgar's finest choral work, and some consider it his masterpiece.
René Leibowitz was a Polish and French composer, conductor, music theorist and teacher. He was historically significant in promoting the music of the Second Viennese School in Paris after the Second World War, and teaching a new generation of serialist composers.
La mer, trois esquisses symphoniques pour orchestre, or simply La mer, L. 109, CD. 111, is an orchestral composition by the French composer Claude Debussy.
Percy Alfred Scholes OBE PhD was an English musician, journalist, vegetarianism activist and prolific writer, whose best-known achievement was his compilation of the first edition of the Oxford Companion to Music. His 1948 biography The Great Dr Burney was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
Dichterliebe, A Poet's Love, is the best-known song cycle by Robert Schumann. The texts for its 16 songs come from the Lyrisches Intermezzo by Heinrich Heine, written in 1822–23 and published as part of Heine's Das Buch der Lieder. Along with the song cycles of Franz Schubert, Schumann's form the core of the genre in musical literature.
John Royds Culshaw, OBE was a pioneering English classical record producer for Decca Records. He produced a wide range of music, but is best known for masterminding the first studio recording of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, begun in 1958.
Falstaff – Symphonic Study in C minor, Op. 68, is an orchestral work by the English composer Edward Elgar. Though not so designated by the composer, it is a symphonic poem in the tradition of Franz Liszt and Richard Strauss. It portrays Sir John Falstaff, the "fat knight" of William Shakespeare's Henry IV Parts 1 and 2.
Edward Charles Sackville-West, 5th Baron Sackville was a British music critic, novelist and, in his last years, a member of the House of Lords. Musically gifted as a boy, he was attracted as a young man to a literary life and wrote a series of semi-autobiographical novels in the 1920s and 1930s. They made little impact, and his more lasting books are a biography of the essayist Thomas De Quincey and The Record Guide, Britain's first comprehensive guide to classical music on record, first published in 1951.
The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music was a widely distributed annual publication from Britain published by Penguin Books that reviewed and rated currently available recordings of classical music. It was written by Ivan March, a music journalist, consultant and former professional musician; Edward Greenfield, music critic of The Guardian and Robert Layton, music writer and lecturer. All three were also reviewers for the UK classical music monthly Gramophone. From 2002, a fourth contributor, Paul Czajkowski, was credited, first as assistant editor and then as co-author.
John Barry Steane was an English music critic, musicologist, literary scholar and teacher, with a particular interest in singing and the human voice. His 36-year career as a schoolmaster overlapped with his career as a music critic and author of books on Elizabethan drama, and opera and concert singers.
Myers Foggin was an English concert pianist and conductor. Born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England. He studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London from 1927–1932. His teachers included the composer York Bowen.
The first recording of Edward Elgar's Symphony No 1 was made by the London Symphony Orchestra in 1930, conducted by the composer for His Master's Voice. The recording was reissued on long-playing record (LP) in 1970, and on compact disc in 1992 as part of EMI's "Elgar Edition" of all the composer's electrical recordings of his works.
Desmond Christopher Shawe-Taylor,, was a British writer, co-writer of The Record Guide, music critic of the New Statesman, The New Yorker and The Sunday Times and a regular and long-standing contributor to The Gramophone.
Edward Elgar's Symphony No 2 was first recorded complete in 1927 by His Master's Voice conducted by the composer. This recording was reissued on LP record and later on compact disc. There was no further recording for seventeen years, until Sir Adrian Boult made the first of his five recordings of the symphony in 1944. Since then there have been many more new recordings, the majority played by British orchestras with seven of them recorded by the London Philharmonic.
Peter Edward Andry, was a classical record producer and an influential executive in the recording industry, active from the 1950s to the 1990s.
This is a discography of The Merry Widow, an operetta by the Austro–Hungarian composer Franz Lehár. It was first performed at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna on 30 December 1905. The operetta has been recorded both live and in the studio many times, and several video recordings have been made. The first recording of a substantially complete version of the score was made in 1907 with Marie Ottmann and Gustav Matzner in the lead roles. The next full recording was issued in 1950, in English with Dorothy Kirsten and Robert Rounseville in the leading roles.
Robert Edward Layton was an English musicologist and music critic.
Between 1958 and 1965 the Decca record company made the first complete recording to be released of Richard Wagner's tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen. Of the four component operas, there had been two previous studio recordings of Die Walküre, and a monaural radio recording of Götterdämmerung, which was released on record in 1956, but Decca's was the first Ring cycle planned and recorded for the gramophone.