Gramophone Classical Music Awards 2013 category winners revealed!
Charlotte Smith
Tuesday, August 27, 2013
After months of deliberation and hours of listening, the category winners for the Gramophone Classical Music Awards 2013 – once again presented in association with EFG International and Steinway & Sons – are revealed.
Released over the past 12 months, these outstanding recordings represent the best in their fields - drawn from an initial long list of over 800 recordings which is reduced to a shortlist of 66 and voted for by our specialist critics.
In three weeks’ time – on September 17 – one of these 11 will be named our Recording of the Year at an event in London that will also reveal, among others, our Artist of the Year, Young Artist of the Year, Label of the Year and the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award.
In the meantime you can listen to tracks and read full reviews of each of the winning recordings in the 11 categories:
Baroque Instrumental
Baroque Vocal
Chamber
Choral
Concerto
Contemporary
Early Music
Instrumental
Opera
Orchestral
Vocal
To see pictures of the winning album covers visit our Awards Gallery.
To mark this year's Gramophone Classical Music Awards, iTunes has made the winning recordings available as 'Mastered for iTunes'. Instead of relying on the standard 16-bit 44.1kHz sound quality offered by CD, the 'Mastered for iTunes' process starts with a 24-bit up-to-96kHz master file and converts this to iTunes's standard AAC format, playable like all iTunes downloads on your Mac, PC or mobile device. In addition Apple has made their AAC encoder available to Mastering Engineers so they can preview exactly what will be downloaded. Many feel the results are as good if not better than the quality of a CD, and virtually indistinguishable from a studio master. If you already have an iTunes account, click here; if new to iTunes, visit iTunes and click on the blue 'Download Now' button to install. Then click here and iTunes will open
