No serious classical music fan will be unfamiliar with The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music, not least because, at 1,600 pages, it is rather difficult to miss. This weighty tome occupies pride of place on the counters of classical music shops the world over, usually in the form of a tattered, bisected copy that has been pawed and pored over by countless CD shoppers looking for guidance on which version of Tosca or the Brandenburg Concertos they should buy. Unless one has had the foresight to bring a huge stack of Gramophone back issues along to the CD store, the Penguin Guide's potted reviews and comparisons of tens of thousands of discs can prove an invaluable resource.
I've never actually owned a copy of the guide before - the heavily abused store copy has generally sufficed - but I decided to pick up the recently released 2008 edition the other day while I was at HMV. Mostly, it has to be said, I bought it for the pretty cover - I'm a sucker for sexy packaging - but also because this latest edition has made an historic leap, an innovation that will surely shake the classical music world to its very core: the introduction of a fourth star.
Yes, that's right: like the amp that goes up to 11, the Penguin Guide's time-honoured rating out of three now goes up to four. This, according to editor Ivan March, is due to there being a "huge number of recorded performances of such excellence that even our three-star valuation seems insufficient guidance for the collector seeking to discover our primary recommendations". Indeed, as virtually every recording listed in previous editions carried a three-star rating, the cachet of the guide's star system had been somewhat dimmed. Now the third star is merely a poor cousin to the fourth, though where this leaves the celebrated Rosette - the recording industry's equivalent of a Michelin star, awarded only to those discs felt to possess a "special something" - remains to be seen.
Naturally, the guide continues to be as frustrating as it is enlightening. The UK-based contributors still exhibit a clear bias towards British performers and performances, while the selection of modern music remains typically woeful: a heavyweight modern composer such as Pierre Boulez gets only eight entries, while C Hubert Parry, whose chief claim to fame is the four-minute hymn Jerusalem, gets an astonishing 22. But I suppose that, even at 1,600 pages, space is limited and certain corners inevitably have to be cut.
Whatever the case, despite its shortcomings, its occasionally daffy opinions, its incomprehensible layout and its flimsy binding, the Penguin Guide remains an institution. If my new copy isn't falling to bits by the time the 2009 edition comes out next year, I will be very surprised.
