Record Winners of 2019

golden CD Even though I wrote an article on this blog in December 2016 railing against the annual Grammys, Prix du Disques, etc. that all the record labels (and sometimes, but not normally) the artists seem to covet as if they actually meant something, I’ve decided to do my own annual retrospective on what I felt were indeed the most exceptional albums of the year in both classical and jazz.

Why?

Two reasons. #1, December is the worst month of the year for reviewing, because so many of the albums released are Christmas-theme-based and, as a Buddhist and a Deist, I don’t do Christmas. (Not knocking you if you do, it’s just not my thing.) #2, since no one in the industry pays that much attention to me anyway, it’s kind of a poke in the eye of the establishment for me to say what I felt were the best records of the year because I’m sure that 99% of my picks won’t be theirs. I say that because, for the most part, I gravitate to more modern music than they do and, when I do gravitate to older music, it’s generally edgier, less romantic performances than those everyone else likes.

There’s some French guy on YouTube who calls himself Professor Fabre—maybe he’s a real professor, maybe he’s not, who can tell?—who has a channel he calls Classical Music / /Reference Recordings in which he presents the “Recording of the Century” for a great deal of the standard repertoire. A few times I agree with him, as in the case of the almost-complete Beethoven Piano Sonatas by Walter Gieseking, but most of the time I tear my hair out because this guy is always pushing the “warmest” and “most human” performances, which often translates to mushy Romanticism. (Klemperer’s Fidelio is a perfect example). But eventually I figured, What the heck, it’s his taste, not mine, and if hundreds of people want to click on his links and enjoy what he has to offer, that’s their thing.

WP 2019 So maybe you’ll agree with my thing, maybe not. I’m not ranking any of these recorded performances like the others do. No categories and no first-second-third-fourth place. Every record I really loved from start to finish (that’s the key) gets my WHAT A PERFORMANCE! award. Pretty simple, huh? Maybe it’ll catch on. If I had enough money, I’d probably start a podcast called WHAT A PERFORMANCE! and offer my weekly discoveries of the things that move me to the world, but I’m also not that egotistical. The late jazz composer Alonso Levister used to rib me for putting the word “I” in my reviews. “Boy, you’re such an egotist!” he’d say, No, I replied, I’m not an egotist, it’s just that everything I write about music reflects my own personal tastes and reactions, not anyone else’s, and many are the times when I say, “but you may feel differently” because it’s true. No two people in the world hear all music exactly the same, certainly not me and Professor Fabre. And possibly not even me and you.

So anyhow, here are my first annual WHAT A PERFORMANCE! awards. I’m going to go back through my reviews for the year and add the award image on those that won. In the future—meaning, starting in January 2020—I’ll just put the blue ribbon on each CD that merits a rave, then put out the list at the end of the year, but for 2019 I have to work backwards.

Since I’ve already written what I wanted to about these discs, there will be no recaps. Just click on the links below to read the full reviews. Enjoy!

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