The recording industry is one of the marvels of 20th century. From the cylinder of Edison to the Compact Disc created at Philips laboratories, recorded sound quality moved from unbearable to a level of perfection, that many people today prefer to play a CD at home than to attend a concert. For the majority of mankind recorded sound is the only way to listen to classical music.

Emile Berliner created a way of mass production by inventing the disk format, that is easily pressed. As a result, availability of titles grew from the voice of Nipper's master to an average of 30.000 classical, in the American market, as listed in the famous Schwann record catalog.

This amazing number of classical titles includes works of hundreds of composers from famous to obscure, dozens of works by many of them from masterpieces to curiosities, many performances of some works by different artists, and eventually by the same artist in different periods of his life. Beethoven's Fifth symphony has an average of 30 recordings available in USA and reached more than 60 in recent editions of the Schwann catalog.

With such amount of options, anyone wishing to start or expand a collection of classical recordings needs information. The obvious way of getting information about a recording is to listen to it, but unfortunately this is not easy with classical music because the vinyl record became famous for its fragility and the Compact Disc, albeit stronger, can be damaged by mishandling. To complicate even more the life of consumers, record companies started sealing CDs in cellophane.

Readable information is the other way we have to make a choice. In some newspapers, magazines, books, catalogs and now the Internet, it is possible to find texts about classical music and its recordings. This book is one of these texts.

This book owes its existence to the Internet. I published in 1976 some articles on sound technology in a Brazilian newspaper ( Jornal do Brasil ), but that was a secondary activity and other professional priorities forced me to abandon the project. The idea of a book in Portuguese was also left in the attic because the only one ( written by an Austrian immigrant - Otto Maria Carpeaux - and excellent, by the way ) on the subject of classical music was hard to find and is even harder nowadays. The sudden widespread of the Internet and its availability in Brazil moved the idea from the attic to these pages, but with a radical change: written in English.

The other driving force to produce this book is that after more than 40 years of stereophonic tape recordings, almost half of this period using digital technology, there is a great legacy of performances that are artistically excellent and technically very difficult to surpass, covering a vast repertory of classical music, so this book will not become obsolete in a year.

The book has two chapters: one covers the technology and philosophies of recording plus some history; the other is an alphabetical list of composers with the best and sometimes, as antithesis, the worst recordings of their most important works. The list is terse and contains what I consider an essential repertory. While the artistic judgement is unashamedly subjective, the technical is objective, giving to the reader information that will save him hours of frustration and a lot of money on recordings made by incompetent engineers and producers.

I am glad with this opportunity of sharing 40 years of listening experiences, and I am also trying to help record stores in building a good stock of classical recordings, that will never become unsold surplus.

Concluding, I beg to readers excuse for my English, and I will be grateful to anyone sending me e-mail with corrections, that will be applied to the next edition. 

amilcar@iname.com

© Copyright 1998 Amilcar Schiappe Pereira