Classical Music Award sources on the net?!

With thousands of CDs available in the market, awards and ratings by the experts can be a useful aid for the music lover to narrow down the choice to a manageable number for auditioning.

Some of the top awards I have heard about are:

Gramophone Annual Awards, Gramophone Critics Choice, Gramophone Disc of the month
Penguin Guide Rosette, Penguin Guide 3-Star
BBC awards
Diapason d'Or, 5-Diapason rating
CHOC Le Monde de la Musique, 4-Star Le Monde de la Musique
Telerama 4 forte
Repertoire 10
Cannes Classical Award
Pries der deutschen Scallplattenkritik

Gramophone has a useful website with full details of their annual awards. http://www.gramophone.co.uk/

Does anyone know any other websites that list any or all of these awards going back, say the last 10 years?!

 

I wouldn't worry too much about who's getting the awards. Many of these seem to be propelled by industry interests. For instance I believe Anne-Sophie Mutter gets awarded for about every fart she records, just because she's one of DG's major assets in a dwindling market. However IMHO most of her recordings are exceptionally unmusical.

Also, as with wines and poetry, there are so many awards by now, that virtually every recording that is not out of tune garners one or two awards.

So I guess the bad news, one has to trust one's own ears (and make a couple of mistakes, sometimes).

Herman

 

Agree totally with Hermann - awards say nothing about your individual musical tastes and perceptions. In my opinion they serve at best only as general guides to things that may be worth further investigation.

As I mentioned on HFC, I trust Penguin most, because its opinions seem to tally most often with what I like to hear. Gramophone is good, but, being often written by music scholars, tends to be a bit too highbrow for me - and you can't sometimes avoid the feeling that, like music and art critics in major newspapers, some of Gramophone's contributors write to show how clever they are, rather than to inform.

 

Thank you both for your inputs.

Sad but true!

Problem with listening before buying is that most record shops stock very few classical CDs making auditioning difficult.

In Britain, listening to non-commercial classical music stations such as the BBC Radio 3 is a great help.