Gramophone

Editor	Martin Cullingford
Categories	Classical music
Frequency	Monthly
Publisher	Mark Allen Group
First issue	1923
Country	United Kingdom
Based in	London, England
Language	English
Website	gramophone.co.uk
ISSN	0017-310X

Gramophone is a magazine published monthly^[1] in London devoted to classical music, particularly to reviews of recordings. It was founded in 1923 by the Scottish author Compton Mackenzie. It was acquired by Haymarket in 1999.^[2] In 2013 the Mark Allen Group became the publisher.^[3]

The magazine presents the Gramophone Awards each year to the classical recordings which it considers the finest in a variety of categories.

In the title bar of its website Gramophone claims to be: "The world's authority on classical music since 1923." This used to appear on the front cover of every issue; recent editions have changed the wording to "The world's best classical music reviews."

Its circulation, including digital subscribers, was 24,380 in 2014.^[4]

Awards, Editor's Choice, Critics' Choice and the Gramophone Hall of Fame[edit]

Apart from the annual Gramophone Awards, each month features a dozen recordings as Gramophone Editor's Choice (now Gramophone Choice). Then, in the annual Christmas edition, there is a review of the year's recordings where each critic selects four or five recordings - these selections make up the Gramophone Critics' Choice. In April 2012, Gramophone launched its Hall of Fame, an annual listing of the men and women (artists, producers, engineers, A&R directors and label founders) who have contributed to the classical record industry. The first 50 were revealed in the May 2012 issue and on Gramophone’s website, and each year will see another intake of honorees into the Hall of Fame.^[5]

Parody[edit]

Glenn Gould wrote a parody review in the style of Gramophone for the liner notes to his 1968 recording of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony transcribed for solo piano by Liszt. The review, which purports to be from "the English magazine The Phonograph" includes this passage:

Unusual recordings of the Beethoven Fifth are, of course, no novelty to the British collector. One calls to mind that elegiac statement Sir Joshua committed to the gramophone in his last years as well as that splendidly spirited rendition transcribed under actual concert conditions by the Newcastle-on-Tyne Light Orchestra upon the occasion of the inadvertent air-alarm of 27 August 1939 [...] The entire undertaking smacks of that incorrigible American pre-occupation with exuberant gesture and is quite lacking in those qualities of autumnal repose which a carefully judged interpretation of this work should offer.^[6]

Archive[edit]

In late 2012, Gramophone announced the launch of a new archive service.^[7] Subscribers to the digital edition are now able to read complete PDFs of every issue of the magazine dating back to its launch in 1923, a substantial improvement on the previous service where readers were only able to read OCR text versions of archive magazine articles.

References[edit]

External links[edit]

• Official website


• 
  Gramophone Archive (1923 – present)