Our favorite things: recordings.(STAFF PICKS)

Once again, we have asked our staff to pick their 10 favorites from among the many recordings they have encountered, employed, and enjoyed during the past year. Note that the selections are not limited to recordings that were released during the past year. Note also that some staffers abstained entirely, while others could not confine themselves to a mere 10 recordings. In any event, we think you will agree that this is quite an eclectic and entertaining list; we hope that you find it useful. Enjoy!

Steve Baird

Well, another year has passed announcing to me that it's time to think about writing a short report on the best recordings I've heard recently. As regular Sensible Sound readers know, my endeavors for the magazine have concentrated on reissues in new formats. When I began this back in the eighties, this column regularly considered recordings that had been converted from LP to CD. Later on, this meant that as digital technologies evolved, I wrote about the introduction of supposed improvements. That meant that many CDs that had been LPs originally were being reissued again. Sometimes improvements were obvious in these later reissues, sometimes not. In 1999, I got an introduction to SACD, and was, again, put into the position of thinking about what this entirely new format could do to improve sound quality for avid music lovers and audiophiles. Sadly, though, it is beginning to look like the days are numbered for those with an interest in recorded music in any format. This is, in large part, due to consumers' lack of interest.

Pundits, industry spokespersons and hobbyists alike predict the end of the CD as a music medium sooner than later. The giants of the industry sought to stave this off by introducing DVD-A and SACD, but both of these proved to have little effect on consumers who would rather use something visual to go along with their sound. To this end, the industry is looking to Blu-Ray or old music repackaged with DVD videos on separate disks to keep them afloat. This is not going to happen. There appears to be a limit to the number of format options in which consumers will spend money on the same item again. How many different copies of Kind of Blue or the Beatles does one need anyway?

Adding to all of this has been the continual decline in the sales of classical music. There have been a number of forces at work to ensure its demise. Even educational systems that have dropped music appreciation as an elective subject have had a hand in this decline. Perhaps Adlai Stevenson's essay, "The Fuss about Eggheads," had something to do with it too. This writing from the Democratic Party's presidential candidate for the 1952 and 1956 elections resulted from Richard Nixon's characterization of Stevenson, a Princeton graduate, as an egghead. The essay told of the anti-intellectual movement afoot in America that branded people of intelligence and culture as someone dangerous and to be avoided. As a result, many people would categorize certain kinds of music as boring without ever having heard it. The record companies, too, contributed to such a characterization. RCA even released an album titled Classical Music for People Who Don't Like Classical Music.

The unions governing classical music performance in the USA haven't helped either. The charges imposed on record companies for the services of orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony have made it far too expensive for them to compete against foreign groups in all parts of Europe and elsewhere. I haven't begun to touch upon other issues like piracy and the like that have been made all the more easy by such conveniences as computers and the internet, but in the interest of brevity, I'll be leaving this to the reader's imagination. Suffice it to say that I have to admit that listening to music on a CD or LP on two speakers does look like it really is going to pass into history. As such it behooves those of us who really do enjoy this pastime to stock up on the best recordings ever made.

In choosing the recordings for this list, I wanted to be absolutely confident that they offer the best combination of both music and sound--a listing of perfect 10 recordings, if you will, where neither dominates. Most, if not all of these, are out of print, but as most readers know, there is often a source for these. When I reported on the Classic Records reissue CD of Harry Belafonte's live performance at Carnegie Hall two years ago, I set about to investigate other reissues from Classic just to see if this one was a fluke. After examining just a few others I soon realized that Mike Hobson at Classic was onto something, so I began searching for all of them. Some of these have made the final cut. So, without further ado, here is my list of the best recordings in my collection.