It's become a Gramophone institution, our annual Recordings of the Year free digital magazine is the ultimate guide to the most compelling and beautiful classical releases of 2019. This year the digital magazine comes complete with links to Apple Music so that you can listen to the albums as you discover them. Visit Exact Editions to enjoy the digital magazine: Recordings of the Year 2019

Editor-in-Chief James Jolly introduces Recordings of the Year 2019:

I don’t know how you listen to your music – do you stream, do you listen to CDs, do you still cherish the LP or do you opt for high-res downloads? (Personally, 90 per cent of my listening is streamed and the wealth of music accessible at the click of a mouse has opened my ears to astounding quantities of music and I’ve made some truly wonderful discoveries.) But at the end of the day it doesn’t matter in the slightest, because whatever the conduit, it’s about the music. ‘Just listen!’ might as well be the mantra for our time. And more of us than ever before are listening to music.

The past 12 months, or 13 issues in Gramophone’s calendar, have once again brought their fair share of stunning recordings. Looking down the listing of most-played albums in my Apple Music account is to be reminded of the joy at discovering Vivaldi’s opera Il Giustino in the very fine Naïve recording directed by Ottavio Dantone (March), or Jan Lisiecki’s effervescent DG album of the two Mendelssohn piano concertos (April) – a terrific confirmation that making him our Young Artist of the Year way back in 2013 (and he’s only 24 now!) was entirely justified, or Véronique Gens’s gorgeous Alpha recording of music by Chausson (June), or Denis Kozhukhin’s heavenly Pentatone collection of piano miniatures by Grieg and Mendelssohn (September – and an album that greatly aided Pentatone’s nomination on the way to becoming our Label of the Year), or Christian Tetzlaff’s magnificent recording of the Beethoven Violin Concerto for Ondine (October) … The list could go on and on.

In the pages that follow, we remind you of the 13 Recordings of the Month as selected by Gramophone’s Editor Martin Cullingford and the nine Editor’s Choices made each month. And we’ve also included our 2019 Gramophone Classical Music Award winners (presented this year with Apple Music, the Adam Mickiewicz Institute’ Polska Music programme and Medici.TV), just to add to the embarras de richesses to dazzle you even further! Click on the sleeves and you’ll be conveyed to Apple Music where you can sample the albums (with the exception of Hyperion), and if you avail yourself of a free three-month subscription you can listen to the entire album (and the thousands of others that can be auditioned with that enticing click of the mouse). Enjoy the feast of great music and great music-making at the end of another vintage year.

James Jolly

Editor-in-Chief, Gramophone

December 2019

Follow the link to read: Recordings of the Year 2019