The Penguin Guide mirrors a huge expansion of the recorded repertoire, covering a far, far wider range of music than can be heard "live" in the concert hall, recital room and opera house, and in so doing has increased the reputation of many composers who were virtually unknown three decades ago and discovered and revealed the quality of the music of others that were hitherto merely names to most music lovers.
The new, 30th Edition of the Penguin Guide surveys the key classical recordings issued and re-issued on CD over the past two decades, many of which have dominated the catalogue because of their sheer excellence, irrespective of their recording dates. DVDs and SACDs are also dealt with enabling you to be sure of acquiring the finest available version of any major classical work.
With the 2005/6 edition The Penguin Guide celebrates its 30th year of publication but it had a distinguished ancestor in The Stereo Record Guide which first appeared as long ago as 1960.
Its genesis is fascinating. Ivan March, the Guide's Editor had been a collector of classical recordings since his early teenage years. He was as interested in the balance of sound and ambient realism as in the interpretative strength of a performance and the quality of playing but he always felt that something was missing and when the first stereo recordings arrived in the 1950s he realised that the obvious increase in naturalness was nothing to do with the left-right effects in which stereo demonstrators revelled but a profound improvement in the ambient warmth, which at last did justice to massed strings, while giving the woodwind bloom, and the brass a proper depth and resonance.
Yet because the early stereo reproducing equipment was not of high quality, the hi-fi pundits of the day started saying in print that "good mono was better than bad stereo". Not so! There was an extra realism with stereo even on a modest reproducer. So LM. decided to publish a book which said so; and he found two colleagues who agreed with him, Edward Greenfield, Record & Music Critic of "The Guardian", and Denis Stevens, an acknowledged scholar/performer and expert in the field of early music (later to be replaced by the equally distinguished Robert Layton). In the autumn of 1960 The Stereo Record Guide appeared. It was an immediate success, even appearing on the shelves of the book department at the famous London store, Harrods - quite an achievement for a completely new publication.
The Penguin Stereo Record Guide first arrived in the autumn of 1975. It was a book of 1100 pages and covered 435 composers and listed and reviewed some 4500 L P recordings. It was a great success, being reprinted in early 1976 and 1977. In 1978 its editor was visiting Honolulu and going into the Tower record store was astonished to find a copy of the current edition on the counter for reference - its pages were black with use! It became an annual publication thereafter, including additional Penguin Guides to Bargain CDs in 1992 and 1998 and a Penguin Guide to Cassettes in 1979. The 1984 Guide heralded the arrival of CDs and covered all three formats, LPs, Cassettes and CDs and in consequence was a huge best-seller. The huge increase in the number of recordings issued meant that from 1989 onwards the main Guide appeared bi-annually and in the years between came a Year Book, bringing the main volume up to date and finding space for the growing number of important Collections, Concert and Recital discs for which there was no longer room in the main Guide.
DVDs made their debut as an appendix in the 2002 Main Edition and the coverage was expanded in the 2002/3 Year Book. SACDs followed in the 2004 Edition and the new surround-sound SACDs are now being dealt with in depth in the forthcoming volume. They can offer a remarkable listening experience, very like sitting in the concert hall itself and alongside the video experience of DVDs clearly point to the future.
Yet recorded music has a century of history behind it and many of the early recordings by legendary names are also returning to the catalogues, often with greatly improved sound and background hiss and clicks all but eliminated. Because of the greatness of the artists involved these early recordings can bring much musical refreshment and "first" recordings of new music are usually very special, even if the sound itself is dated. So, whatever the future, older recordings retain their distinction. All are covered in depth in the Penguin Guide which now appears in the book and record shops of all the major English-speaking countries and was published in China in translation in 1999.
Because of increased use of space and clever computerised type-setting we can now include more recordings to a page and so the current 2005/6 guide covers more than 11,600 CD listings and reviews and over 300 DVDs.
You may send your order by:
- email to sales@lprl.demon.co.uk
- phoning/faxing 01253 405599 in the UK (+44 1253 405599 elsewhere)
- writing to
Squires Gate Music Centre
615 Lytham Road, Squires Gate
Blackpool, Lancs, FY4 1RG
England
Back to our homepage