The International Guide to Building a Classical Music Library

Rating:
Summary: An Explorers Guide
Review: I'd been a classical music collector for about 19 years when a friend gave me this book for Christmas. I put off reading it thinking it looked like a book for beginners (it is and more). When I did started reading it I was unable to put it down. It offers information and insight with out loading you down with the author's opinions. I hate buying a CD and reading the liner notes and having whoever wrote it tell me how inferior the composer was. Many reviewers and resource books do the same, its only good if "I" say it is, and "MY" opinion is all your should be concerned with. With Bill Parker classical music is a world waiting to be explored, and enjoyed. It doesn't cover everything, but it is a good read.

Rating:
Summary: An Explorers Guide
Review: I'd been a classical music collector for about 19 years when a friend gave me this book for Christmas. I put off reading it thinking it looked like a book for beginners (it is and more). When I did started reading it I was unable to put it down. It offers information and insight with out loading you down with the author's opinions. I hate buying a CD and reading the liner notes and having whoever wrote it tell me how inferior the composer was. Many reviewers and resource books do the same, its only good if "I" say it is, and "MY" opinion is all your should be concerned with. With Bill Parker classical music is a world waiting to be explored, and enjoyed. It doesn't cover everything, but it is a good read.

Rating:
Summary: Good for beginners, bad for chamber music fans
Review: This book has several features that make it helpful for beginners: it is a survey of Western music from Gregorian Chant to Minimalism, a biographical dictionnary of its main composers, from William Byrd to Phillip Glass, and a guide to the best recordings of each composer's main works. All this in a little more than 300 pages! Of course it can't be compared with much bigger and comprehensive guides like the Penguin or the Grammophone. The closest thing there is to it is Kenneth and Valerie McLeish's "The Listener's Guide to Classical Music", which is about the same size and also deals with composers in alphabetical order (but does not classify them according to periods). The main difference between the two books is that McLeishes' says which works of each composer you should look for, but gives no indications of the best recordings available, as Bill Parker does. So that this book may turn out to be the better one for beginners. However, Parker doesn't care much about chamber music: not even famous masterpieces as Schubert's and Mozart's string quintets are mentioned and, among Haydn's many great string quartets, only the "Emperor" quartet is considered. If you like chamber music, this is not the book for you.

Rating:
Summary: Good for beginners, bad for chamber music fans
Review: This book has several features that make it helpful for beginners: it is a survey of Western music from Gregorian Chant to Minimalism, a biographical dictionnary of its main composers, from William Byrd to Phillip Glass, and a guide to the best recordings of each composer's main works. All this in a little more than 300 pages! Of course it can't be compared with much bigger and comprehensive guides like the Penguin or the Grammophone. The closest thing there is to it is Kenneth and Valerie McLeish's "The Listener's Guide to Classical Music", which is about the same size and also deals with composers in alphabetical order (but does not classify them according to periods). The main difference between the two books is that McLeishes' says which works of each composer you should look for, but gives no indications of the best recordings available, as Bill Parker does. So that this book may turn out to be the better one for beginners. However, Parker doesn't care much about chamber music: not even famous masterpieces as Schubert's and Mozart's string quintets are mentioned and, among Haydn's many great string quartets, only the "Emperor" quartet is considered. If you like chamber music, this is not the book for you.