The Penguin Guide to Compact Discs and DVDs Yearbook 2006/07 Edition

Product Details

This yearbook supplements The Penguin Guide to Compact Discs and DVDs, the largest and most comprehensive survey of classical music on digital audio and video discs ever published. Together, the two books cover thousands of recordings and films, offering candid evaluation of their relative artistic and technical merits, highlighting notable performances, and pinpointing best buys. This yearbook not only reviews the many hundreds of CDs that have appeared since the publication of the main guide in 2005, but it also takes a close look at some of the more unusual areas of the classical music repertoire and includes an extensive section on instrumental concerts and recitals. Designed to help select the very best classical music and video discs available to date, The Penguin Guide to Compact Discs and DVDs Yearbook is an invaluable resource for any classical music lover.

Product Reviews

(5 stars) - The breadth and scope of the entries in this book will amaze you!
Have you ever been frustrated, disgusted and discouraged by the overabundance of lousy classical music productions and selections you run across these days? Sometimes it's hard to purchase quality CDs and DVDs with the number of junk recordings flooding the market and you may, as a serious collector of classical recordings, need a quality reference as a guide before emptying your wallet on recordings that may as well be featured on a rack in the local dollar store. THE PENGUIN GUIDE TO COMPACT DISCS & DVDs: Yearbook 2006/7 Best Buys in Classical Music (the companion to the main Penguin Guide) will provide you with everything you need to begin or expand the superlative collection you've always wanted.

Choices of key recordings, sometimes with several selections, are offered to the collector. The reader can peruse offerings in instrumental recitals, vocal and choral collections and concerts of orchestral and concertante music. In addition there is an A to Z compendium of brief biographical sketches of composers and their works and another entailing EMI's great artists and conductors. Literally hundreds of new and reissued CDs are reviewed. The reviews, almost scholarly and certainly knowledgeable, will assist the reader in making the perfect selection according to his needs or desires. The collector need not settle for space fillers in a collection when the learned ears and minds can help him find the best that money can buy (often at bargain basement prices).

I was certainly taken by the breadth and scope that the entries in this book entail. I especially enjoyed some of the candid ones nestled in the pages of this book. "With the chorus less well focused than it should be, the glory of the set lies in the solo singing from an exceptionally starry quartet ...." If you think you are a class classical act and want a classical music collection to match, you need a top quality guide and this is THE one you need to purchase!

(3 stars) - Again, Some Reservations
Again, here, as with my review of the "Guide" itself (odd years is this Guide, even years are the Update), I find that I no longer feel as I did years ago about this book.

I sadly feel that the beginner with collecting classical music needs a smaller, not so expensive book and supplement every other year, as this is. This book, like the guide, years ago was much simpler, and was easily recommendable to the novice music collector. I cannot review this supplement (and the Guide) anymore for the general music buying public, as I feel it no longer serves all equally. It has become a guide, I feel, for the more experienced listener/collector, and that is OK, but the beginner, I feel is wasting his/her money on these guides.

Where to tell them to seek help? I'm not really sure, but I suggest perhaps the Rough Guide to Classical Music, and perhaps the NPR Guide.... I feel that basically the top 100 list on the first pages of the Penguin Guides are all the beginner will really need for a few years, why waste $45 on these two books?????

Sorry to sound negative, I really don't mean to, but I cannot see that these books serve the "general" music public. ~operabruin

(5 stars) - How can you go wrong...?
Buying CD's is expensive...the Penguin Classical CD/DVD is a must. Why? Because it will save you alot of money...period. Whether you agree with every review or not, if you buy CD's...you can for the price of one get help in deciding which to buy, and which to stay from. I have used my guide alot, and usually end up completely agreeing with the reviews. Buy it...you'll like it.

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