Rating: 
Summary: Fine all-around effort
Review: First of all, in order to properly consider the merits of this book, and not be surprised at the tenor of the writing or style of the criticism, it's worthwhile to check out the editorial reviews for this volume (accessible on the menu to the left), which provide an excerpt from the guide and offer some hint of whether or not you'll like the Rough Guides approach. The passionate denunciations of this book from the other customer reviews are interesting, but not particularly well-founded. By its own admission, this guide is somewhat Anglocentric, coming from a British publisher and aimed at CDs available in England - which shouldn't deter you in the slightest, since many are available in the U.S. as well, or can be easily ordered through Amazon's partner UK site. As for the complaints about the tone of the criticism, this is a wholly subjective judgment that every reader must consider. All too often with highly opinionated criticism, though, many readers take offense and launch into fiery diatribes against the author, accusing him of various literary sins, real and imagined. In this case, it's important to understand that although you will not agree with everything this author applauds or condemns, you will likely find his writing style fluid and compelling - unless of course you go for the "Classical Music for Complete and Utter Imbeciles" type of guidebook-writing. The greatest attributes this book offers are its wide breadth, covering a slew of historically obscure and unfairly ignored modern composers (typically dismissed by the likes of Jim Svejda and his fire-breathing, conservative ilk), and its pointed analysis of contemporary trends and developments in the classical world. If it's a large number of reviews per opus you're after, by all means go for the invaluable Gramophone or Penguin guides, but if you value well-written, thoughtful criticism that doesn't provide easy answers or rely on knee-jerk canonical worship, this guide is a must, both for novices and aficionados of music from plainchant to postmodernism.
Rating: 
Summary: More helpful with composers than recordings
Review: I bought the Rough Guide to Classical Music a couple years back to complement the other reference guides in my library. Having used it a couple years, I can say it provides nice summaries of composers and the compostions they rate. It also provides some fascinating features -- such as "What Is a Fugue?" and "Sonata and Sonata Form" -- that provide information the average collector will find helpful if he/she is not a practicing musician.
However, the main reason people buy these books is to get information on CDs they intend to purchase or add to their collection. I use this one and a half-dozen others as reference for that purpose.
On that score, I find the Rough Guide is an average book. I say this because the authors tend to give highest grades to the most oft-recommended CD of a particular piece of music and never -- never -- go off the beaten track to recommend anything outside the standard circle of well known conductors, performers and orchestras.
This tells me the authors of this book do not have a very comprehensive working relationship with classical CDs, even though they have written a book recommending same! This pattern becomes almost predicatable after while. In fact, this book can become more conservative than the ultraconservative American Record Guide in making recommendations on core repertoire.
For the Beethoven Violin Concerto -- which every violinist in history has taken a shot or two at -- this book goes back to World War II to recommend the Menhiun-Furtwangler recording and recommends a Heifitz recording on an old Music and Arts CD. To give balance to current performers, they also include a recommendation for the more recent Hilary Hahn recording.
I've heard all these recordings and Heifitz could not be more different than Hahn. Most collectors that enjoy one would not care for the other, although they might buy it to build their collection. But Heifitz, who jets through the concerto in less than 40 minutes, is a far cry from the romanticism of Hahn and Menhuin.
On the basis of this kind of thing happening over and over again in these pages, I'd say the Rough Guide authors either haven't heard all the recordings out there or they consciously make an effort to satisfy old timers and DDD fanatics simultaneously. Nothing wrong with trying to keep everyone happy, I suppose, although to me it seems like a lack of vision.
Furthermore, the book does not include recordings by a number of composers of note. Bernhard Henrik Crusell, a Scandanaivan composer whose three clarinet concertos have been recorded a half-dozen times in recent years, is not represented in the book. Neither is Franz Krommer, a Moravian Romantic era composer that published several symphonies and a number of popular and often recorded woodwind works.
Meanwhile, composers Carol Gesauldo and Morton Feldman found their way into this book. Also included are Guillame de Machaut, Elisabeth Luytens and Perotin. A living composer named Sofia Gubaidulina gets as many pages in this book as Carl Maria von Weber and more than Einojuhani Rautavarra, the most popular of all living composers.
For these reasons, no serious collector could consider the Rough Guide to Classical Music a core item in their library. I've been collecting books on 78, LP, tape and compact disk criticism going back to "Ewen's Musical Masterpieces", first published in 1954 (Ewen also recommended the Heifitz recording in Beethoven, the old RCA Victor ICT 1010).
I find this book helpful on occasion but, more often that not, it pretends to be a lot more thorough than it is.
Rating:
Summary: The newest edition is even better!!
Review: I owned the previous edition of this book. As someone relatively new to classical music, I found the book to be an ideal place to expand my interests. I initial purched th NPR Guide to begin my collection and then the previous edition of this book.
It is possible to find faults with any guide containing suggestions for recordings and repertoire, I have been highly satisfied with the suggestions in the Rough Guide.
As one of its best features the book contains music from the earlest times and includes contemporay composers. The descriptions of composers and recordings allows one a greater appreciation of the music.
This edition contains twenty essays that did not appear in the previos edition on topics as diverse as gregorian chant to atonlity.
This book is perfect for anyone interesed in Classical Music
Rating:
Summary: Excellent, up to date overview
Review: Some books have too much information in them and will sit on shelves, but never be read. This book is not one of them. The articles are concise and interesting, and feature helpful recommendations of CDs currently available.It is a good resource if you want to keep up to date, because the book gives information about many recent composers, as well as those who are already familiar. I also appreciate the articles interspersed throughout the book on such topics as:
What is a Fugue? Sonatas and Sonata Form
Composers at the Movies
Development of the Keyboard The chronological list of composers is also a helpful bonus. An excellent resource for students, teachers and all interested in Classical Music.
Rating: 
Summary: solid intro to a wide variety of composers
Review: Sure, the critics are right for voicing the opinion that only a small handful of recordings are recommended -- I found the recommendations somewhat capricious (and many fine recordings were left out), but that's not the aim of the book. The portraits of each composer are very well written and give even the novice a good overview of the life of each composer and his significant works. The authors admit in the intro that they are not out to write an exhaustive list of every major work -- actually, I liked the fact that they picked out each composers best works rather than reviewing all of them, even the bad. For readers trying to build a collection, this emphasis on the best pieces is helpful. The organization of the book and the layout is excellent providing quick and easy information. The Penguin guide features many more recordings (and less on each composer and his history), but the Rough guide is equally as useful. I plan to pick up the Penguin guide to balance out the small faults of this volume. Highly recommended overall with good text boxes that explain many major movements and types of music.
Rating:
Summary: a fine guide ( esp good sections on contemporary music )
Review: The ROUGH GUIDE TO CLASSICAL MUSIC is a very well produced book that has several qualities that make it an essential purchase for lovers of music composed in the European ( Western ) Tradition. First, the book has a tremendous range ( historic and stylistic ), which extends from Hildegard of Bingen ( 1098-1179 ) thru Thomas Ades ( 1971- ). This far-sighted depth is quite useful for the devotee who is not particularly well informed about say, the Medieval or Renaissance periods ( about 20 composers from those periods are featured ) and is more useful still for those interested in "modern" ( or "contemporary" ) music. Where there is a comparative lack of information in other guides ( GRAMOPHONE, PENGUIN, NPR, etc ), the ROUGH GUIDE features a tremendous number of currently active musicians ( some fairly well known and others somewhat obscure ). In fact, with regard to "difficult" music, the ROUGH GUIDE is actually superior to the BLACKWELL GUIDE, which is a volume solely devoted to contemporary composers. Secondly, the thumbnail biographical sketches, while necessarily limited in scope, are quite informative ( the writers really seem to have listened to the music ). As is normal, it will be a matter of taste as to whether one agrees with the recommended recordings; this reviewer found a number of choices to quarrel over, but that is half the fun with these sorts of books anyway. The volume is attractively laid out, with clear type-set and a number of a black and white photos dispersed throughout.
To sum up, THE ROUGH GUIDE TO CLASSICAL MUSIC is a fine book filling a particularly important need for depth and substance. It should perform good service to newcomers and long time fans alike.
Rating: 
Summary: Good overview but bad recommendations for recordings.
Review: The Rough Guide to Classical Music provides a good overview of Western composers and their works. If you are looking to start classical CD collection, this guide does an excellent job of pointing out all the major pieces of music you'll want to purchase. The major down fall of the book is that the author(s) are not very knowledgeable when it comes to great recordings. The best way to check the validity of a Classical Music CD guide is to see how many of George Szell recordings are listed. Unlike any other conductor, there are numerous pieces that Szell simply owned, like Dvorak's Slavonic Dances and symphonies, Zoltan Kodaly's Háry János Suite and Sergey Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kijé. To my surprise, this book didn't have any Szell recordings, not even his Beethoven cycle. So that was quick proof that the guide was going to be making some terribly wrong recommendations. Szell wasn't the only legendary conductor missing from the guide, Karl Bohm was absent as well. Even Ricardo Muti was missing from the Verdi chapter, his Aida recording wasn't even there! Final verdict: If you want to know which pieces of music to buy, this is a good book. If you want to know which CD's to buy, this is a terrible book. If you need help finding the right recordings, check out NPR's guide. I gave this book 2 stars because you can find out on the internet, for free, who the big composers are and what their major works are.
Rating:
Summary: Great introduction book
Review: This book gives a great introduction to classical music. When you don't know much about this music and want to know more, then this book is a excellent guidence to the world of classical music. It is not meant for experts or record collectors. The articles on the artist are well-written and makes you want to listen to their music, well most of the time. I was really looking for a book like this.
Rating:
Summary: An overall helpful book...
Review: This book I found to be an overall quick and easy reference book, there are of course more explicit and more informative books around, but this book is great for an overall view of a composer's life and famous works. But there are several things that I must attend to in this review and that would be: I believe it would be really nice if instead of alphabetical order they would have catagorized them into their eras, but of course this would most likely be only appeasing to me or some other person who knows what eras they are in, so if you don't know about eras etc. then this should not discourage you in any way. I also was rather disappointed that the author yeilded into only putting in their most famous works, which is fine and all, it just even more obscures some of the composer's works of equal quality that have been placed in the back row. (ex: Mozart's string quintets are very famous and I grant, excellent, but why is it that no one ever hears his string Duos and trios which are of equal greatness?) Again, nothing to discourage you from buying this book. But overall this book is a great reference source for novices and experts alike.
Rating:
Summary: not bad...
Review: This is a guide to recommended recordings of the basic classical repertory. Where books like The Penguin Guide present the available recordings and let you decide, this guide, like those by Ted Libbey and Jim Svejda, offers you one or two of the authors' choices for the best record and the reasons why they chose it. So it's like movie criticism, except a lot more useful and applicable to the consumer - we go to the movies to be entertained, but classical music is by contrast all very serious and important (right?), so that finding the most important recordings of the basic repertory is essential for the record collector. Of the three books this one is the least to my liking - I disagree with a lot of the choices here. The authors seem to coming from a musicological angle rather than from an interpretive angle: the guide reads more like music history than criticism. I've learned a lot more from the books by Libbey and Svejda, writers who seem to have a more comprehensive knowledge of the classical recording scene, its history and important trends and accomplishments. Even so, it's useful to have another opinion, and this book does by far the best job with contemporary composers. (The music-history approach does serve the contemporary "classical" scene pretty well, if nothing else.) If you're really serious about collecting classical music on record, I'd get ahold of all three books... but this one last.
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