American Record Guide
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #1055 in Magazine Subscriptions
- Format: Magazine Subscription
Product Description
Covers classical recordings and makes comparisons with other recordings to help in making competent buying decisions.
Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
By esseyo
I think this is probably the best classical recording review magazine in print.(+) It reviews major and minor labels. There are many excellent recordings from minor labels that are ignored in other classical magazines because frankly those labels don't have big ad budgets.(+) It is not afraid of naming better recordings when reviewing another. And definitely not afraid of giving negative reviews. In other magazines (eg, Grammophone), the status quo thumbs up prevails.(+) The reviewer's surname is given at the end of each review. You can form an opinion on which reviewer shares your musical taste and which doesn't.(+) It is not littered with glossy ads from big labels. In fact there is barely a dozen ads in an entire 200 page issue.(+) Some issues have an overview article where their reviewers decide on the best recordings of a particular theme (theme could be a particular composer (eg Mendelssohn) or genre (eg string quartets, Russian music)). At the end of the year each reviewer names his or her best recordings of the year.(+) Its editor, Vroon, is highly opinionated. He reminds me of Andy Rooney; what he writes might infuriate you but at least he has an articulated opinion. For example in the May/June issue, he devotes a page to what he sees is the overuse of the word "receive". What does this have to do with music? Not much, but it is interesting.I recommend buying a subscription directly from them as I imagine their revenue stream is small.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
By Larry VanDeSande
Unlike relative newcomer and competitor Fanfare magazine, American Record Guide (or ARG) has published classical music criticism continuously since the 1930s making it more a peer to England's Gramophone magazine than any other publication in the field or critical classical music performance and recording reviews. And, like Gramophone, American Record Guide dedicates plentiful pages of every issue to music in performance in America and elsewhere. This inlcudes sections called concerts everywhere and another that focuses on opera. Fanfare provides no information on concertizing, but both publications -- which come out six times a year in the same size booklet sized magazine -- focus mostly on reviewing new classical recordings provided to the editors from manufacturers and distributors. ARG has even been known to review recordings provided from its readers.This historic angle aside, I find the reviews in American Record Guide more helpful than those from any other magazine I have subscribed to incuding Fanfare, Gramophone, BBC Music Magazine, International Record Review and the old American standby from a bygone era, Stereo Review. I say this for one reason: ARG employs some of the best and most knowledgable reviewers in the world. I count among these reviewers four men from what I jokingly call ARG's "H Mafia" -- Steve Haller, Lawrence Hansen, Rob Haskins and Roger Hecht.Haskins is one of the most knowledgable critics of Bach and Baroque-era music in the world with opinions and recommendations that go against the grain and challenge conventional train of thought. Haller, Hansen and Hecht are all generalist reviewers who, in the words of the late New York Times critics Harold C. Schonberg, seem to have a working knowledge of every recording ever made (he said this in the preface to the classical review anthology Classical Music: Third Ear: The Essential Listening Companion which featured contributions from a couple of them and many other ARG reviewers.)When I read these reviewers, I am consistently made aware of older recordings I never knew that they recommend as alternatives to the newer recordings other critics think grand and metaphors for excellence. They are not the only wonderful critics in the magazine, either. Others I find consistently engaging and helpful are John Barker (another Baroque critic), Ardella Crawford (who probably knows more Vivaldi recordings than anyone I know), Gil French, Bill Gatens and Ralph Lucano, one of the more entertaining and knowledgable opera critics I have experienced.There are many other fine reviewers writing for American Record Guide but these are the ones that stand out to me. In its primary competitor, Fanfare, I would count only a handful of critics their equal, none of whom are generalists like Haller, Hansen and Hecht: Jeff Lipscomb, one of the world's foremost Bruckner specialists; James North, who specializes in Haydn and 20th century music; and Henry Fogel, who specializes in historic recordings. There are other fine critics at Fanfare; however I count no critic on Fanfare's roster that as often helps me make as many informed buying decisions as any member of the ARG H group.Another thing that makes ARG special is its lack of adherence to advertising or the classical music industry. The magazine carries almost no advertising, mostly because its critics are unafraid to mericlessly attack recordings and marketing practices they find useless or distasteful. The editor and sometime critic, Don Vroon, is especially harsh on just about any period performance recording, often going overboard on it and discarding it from consideration for that reason alone. This sometimes gives the appearance of paraprofessional criticism, as does the magazine's tendency to produce one and two paragraph reviews that don't tell you much about the recording. On balance, however, the good aspects outweigh the bad by quite a distance making ARG (in my opinion) the best buy for anyone considering only one subscription to a classical review magazine.One big disappointment for me is the magazine's current (2012) Mahler expert, a horn player who is a fine writer and definitely has an opinion -- but whose reviews are typically dissections of every movement that fail to determine whatever big picture the conductor and orchestra are trying to create. What makes this worse is the current Mahler specialist in Fanfare magazine uses exactly the same format -- seeing all the trees and telling you about every one but failing to see the forest.Why is this important? For whatever reason, and I have asked God many times why this is, Mahler is now the world's most popular and most oft-recorded symphonist, making him one of the most important composers in classical music. Until Leonard Bernstein and Maurice Abravanel recorded all his symphonies in this country, and until Vaclav Neumann recorded the canon behind the Iron Curtain, Mahler was never considered among the greatest composers. His neuroticism, duration and incongruity (the most printed score directions of any composer; Symphony 3 being a symphony surrounding an oratorio; Symphony 6 allowing either 2 or 3 "hammer" blows; Symphony 7 being an oddball composition; etc.) were not pleasing to most fans, listeners and critics. For whatever reason, those qualities today seem in demand.Thus, any classical music magazine deficient in Mahler coverage does a disservice to its readership, as ARG did most recently in its July-August 2012 issue with a Mahler overview under the pen of its editor, a romantic soul whose ideas about top notch Mahler performance can be far afield. For example, his No. 1 recommendation for Mahler's best symphony, No. 5, is the unremarkable and forgettable recording from Jukka-Pekka Saraste and the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. ARG is hardly alone in this matter; Fanfare has exactly the same problem and there appears to be no Mahler specialist anywhere in Europe oustside Tony Duggan's now half-decade old survey.I'd like to address four other things about ARG: cost, modernism, duration and overview. First, cost: to put it simply, ARG costs less than Fanfare. This is probably becuase Fanfare carries so many more pages every issue -- up to 600 compared to about 250 for ARG. However, many of the extra pages in Fanfare are front end interviews and reviews that endorse or supplement the plentiful pages of color advertising before the main reviews begin. There was 300 pages of this stuff in the last issue I read. ARG has none of this.Second, modernism. ARG is about as old time as a publication can be -- white paper, black ink, two columns of text, almost nothing else. The editor resists efforts to modernize the magazine by adding color photograhpy or art and its webpage carries only a PDF of the current and immediate past issue available only to subscribers. Fanfare, by contrast, is a more modern publication with a far more interactive webstite that makes available to subscribers its database of reviews back to 1989. The English magazine BBC Music also carries a searchable database of older reviews and Gramophone has a searchable database where you can find reviews in almost any issue of the magazine ever published. ARG is hopelessly behind the times in this regard but it costs less, too.Third, duration. In my opinion, the critics in ARG say more using less space, on average, than the Fanfare reviewers do using much more space. It seems to me the ARG editor cuts the reviews quite a bit, leaving only the eseential information in many of them. By contrast, the reviews in Fanfare can run on for a couple pages of single spaced, one column type and often not say a lot about the recording in question. I find reading ARG to almost never be a waste of my time and I find many of the Fanfare reviewers waste my time because they don't get to the point and instead talk about their philosophy, knowledge or information more suited to liner notes than a critical review.Fourth is overview, the greatest feather in ARG's hat. They don't do this much anymore but you can still find overviews by composer that give you ARG recording recommendations for every major piece in a composer's output. Sometimes these are written for a composer's entire discography, for a portion of a composer's production, or by group such as film compsers, German opera, or English orchestral music. ARG started these many years ago and used to update them every decade or so but they have slowed the practice in recent years. You can still collect recent overviews by purchasing older issues; it would be far more convenient if you could read them on, or download them from, the ARG website but that's not likely to happen.In my years subscribing to Fanfare, they have never done an overview by composer although one of its critics once tried to acquire evey existing recording by Sibelius, then made recommendations for every piece by Sibelius. This is as close as Fanfare has ever come to a composer overiew; ARG used to do this all the time. The overviews are, in my opinion, one of American Record Guide's greatest selling points and I wish they would update or create a new one and publish it every issue. It's a lot of work, I agree.To repeat my opening assertion, the main advantage of subscribing to ARG is its critics are, on balance, the best available in the English-speaking press. The best ones know almost every avialable (and many unavailable) recordings of everything they review, giving their criticism authority greater than any other publication I know. ARG does not directly compete with slick magazines like Gramophone and BBC Music, which scrimp on review space because their pages are all full of color imagery, photos, interviews, playlists, equipment reviews and advertising. Like I said before, American Record Guide is an old world journal of criticism that hasn't changed very much in the new century. It is, for me, still the best bet in classical review magazines.
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