OUR CLASSIC CLASSICS
A List of All-Time Great Recordings
Imagine having to start your
music collection again, from the start. The consequence of
some calamity – flood, fire, theft or
whatever – means that your carefully developed collection,
built up over years is gone. In these days of online access
to music, you could simply subscribe to something like the
Naxos Music Library or one of the download sites, and not have
a physical disc entity again. But would that satisfy the collector
in you? If you are like us, you would feel the need to have
some discs.
Or perhaps you have just arrived
at the door to the wide and great world that is classical music. Where
to begin? For a newcomer, the choice of music and recordings
of a particular popular piece is so overwhelming as to make
the first step very difficult.
For both the shattered collector
and the neophyte, surely the discs that you would want to start
with would be the greatest ones: the recordings that thrill
time and time again, no matter how many times you played them.
To that end, we - the editing team of Musicweb International
and some of our reviewers - have constructed a list of those
recordings which are our special
ones.
The list is, of course, very much a personal one. Individual
choices have not been submitted to the panel for approval. It
is possible that one person's choice may be despised by another
(though no one has made such a comment - probably for reasons
of politeness!).
About the lists
For convenience, the main list is
divided into three sections, two alphabetically by composer for recordings
with three or fewer composers, and Miscellaneous for multi-composer
discs. The person whose choice the disc is, is identified in the
normal Musicweb way by their initials in []. There is also a
set of pages,
accessible below, which have each of our individual lists.
It was decided not to require the nominator to provide reasons for
their choice, partly because of time constraints, but mainly because
it would be very difficult to write something that would not simply
repeat superlatives. However, some of us have made some
general comments about the process of making the choices.
Nominations do not have to be currently available nor do they need
to have been reviewed (by anyone) on Musicweb.
A
link to the
MWI review - through the initials - is only provided in cases
where the review has been written by the person nominating
the recording.
Len Mullenger, David
J Barker, Rob
Barnett, Bill Kenny, John Quinn and Patrick
C Waller
Note - Bill Kenny's list
has been delayed by ill health.
