By Official Classical I mean the one published by The Official UK Charts Company, and NOT the chart banded about by ClassicFM which has about six Katherine Jenkins CDs in it   

Oddly (or is just me) I can't SEE the Official Classical Chart on the website of the The Official UK Charts Company, it might be there but I can't find it.

The only place where I DO see the chart is a slim column published in the 'Recording News' section of the BBC Music Magazine. Anyone else subscribe to this?

Anyway, Katherine Jenkins may be missing from the official chart    but there are interesting inclusions and I hope some discussion can be made.

Excuse my notes , this was originally posted at R2ok 

Here's the Top 10 (I'll post 11-20, with my comments, if there is a demand to see them)

No 1 this month, and has been for several months now, is Sting with his Songs Of The Labrynth, his versions of songs by the Elizabethan (16thC) composer/lute player John Dowland. The CD includes a very touching tribute to the somewhat persecuted (Catholic) Dowland by featuring readings of some letters while he was in exile. So the CD is a bit of an experience/learning and not just a vehicle for Sting's voice and lute. Sting's lute contribution might actually be very small, but he is very well supported by a proper lute player Edin Karamazov.
NOTE: The missus to got me the CD for Xmas, and I do like it. Sting's voice may be 20th/21st century but Dowland's songs were for anyone to sing and Sting's rendering of Dowland's songs just might be more authentic than say today's Andreas Scholl or soprano Emma Kirkby !!!!!!!

No 2 and we have Paul McCartney's latest classical venture 'Ecco cor meum'. Nobody seems convinced that he wrote down any of the music maybe he just hums bits to a team of score writers?

No 3 is a proper classical singer, though he is known as a popular ballad singer too. Bryn Terfel sings Mozart with others.

No 4 and ClassicFM gets in there with the CD they produced for Alfie Boe.

No 5 moving up 6 places is singer Renee Fleming. Fleming's 'Homage - the age of the Diva' is in tribute to some of the great sopranos who graced the stage at New York Metropolitan Opera House in the 1920s and who sold huge numbers of 78rpm records for Victrola/HMV, many of which weigh heavy on a bookcase just feet away from me.

No 6 is a Classic FM CD of 'Carols form Buckingham Palace'. Yeah, I know it's February now but this chart is about a month old and gets printed in the BBC magazine ~mid-January

No 7 a budget label (Naxos £5.99) CD of Handel's Messiah. There is so much brilliant singing (in English) and the orchestral scoring is fabulous Handel at his best. Rockitron tracked this one down to an original 1992 recording. New College Choir/Higginbottom.

Naxos have an excellent website for ordering and Borders shops stock a good amount of the Naxos catalogue.

No 8 is another Naxos CD by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra of Elgar music including Sea Pictures sung by Sarah Connolly.

No 9 Holst: 'Planets' with Simon Rattle conducting his Berlin Philharmoniker which is not a group of mouth organ players but what we used to call the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. This CD is doing very well and holding it's place in the top 10.

No 10 Lullaby Classics - Baby Einstein


John W

Hi Anna,

It's odd that the chart can't be read anywhere other than BBCMM ( as far as I know anyway).

If it's 'official' will it not include major internet stores in the statistics? As well cdselections also Naxos, Chandos, Hyperion? Surely it's not still taken from 50 shops in the south of England 

John W

Jeez, lighten up Rob, man!

OK classical-pickers 11 - 20, da-da-da-dadara-da-da-dara,

No 11 'Pilgrimage to Santiago' by the Monteverdi Choir, John Eliot Gardiner. Uplifting, spiritual, if you need that sort of thing. Listen to an excerpt of every one of the 21 tracks at Amazon.

No 12 we have James Galway playing his flute as only he can in his album 'My Magic Flute' playing mainly music not originally written for the flute.

No 13 the debut album from today's mistress of the trumpet, Alison Balsom, who some of you may have seen/heard at the proms. I have heard her play some of the standard trumpet works, and she is fantastic.
She has mastered all the great (but there's too few) trumpet works and in order to supply more CDs for her record company she has to resort to playing 'transcriptions' - musical works NOT written for the trumpet. So on this CD she's playing works originally for violin by Bach and Paganini, jumping from unfeasibly low notes to even more unfeasibly high notes and, well, I'm not a pure purist but it gets ridiculous to me, as someone who loves violin concertos played on the violin.

No 14 is an album from Anna Netrebko released in October last year, singing Russian songs.

No 15 we have Nicola Benedetti with the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto which was released in May last year. The stunning Scottish girl won the BBC Young Musician Of The Year in 2004 and impressed the proms in 2005 with her playing of this concerto which convinced many that she might just be a serious musician and not just a musical babe. The CD features a few other works and there is a strikingly atmospheric piece written by James MacMillan, From Ayrshire, which was composed for Benedetti.

No 16 the debut CD from Simon Keenlyside, baritone, who starred in last years proms singing Mozart. On this Sony CD he also sings works by Rossini, Bellini, Verdi and others so it is a mixed bag of the 'best of opera' indeed the CD has the cheesy title 'Tales of Opera' but this varied progamme does allow Simon to display his versatility.

No 17 is volume 5 of a Bach Cantatas series from the Monteverdi Choir

No 18 is 'Taize Chant' by the St Thomas Music Group, over an hour of music for reflection, contemplation, peace and serenity. Still not heard any of it, I haven't got a clue what Taize is about. A google might tell you.

No 19 is the Best of Maxim Wengerov from Warner Music. Vengerov, from Western Siberia, is a formidable virtuoso violinist who has tackled all of the difficult violin concertos in the standard repetoire with great success. Now, the Best Of Maxim Vengerov, I believe, is an 11 CD set of all his Teldec CDs at a budget price. Several of the great violin concertos are featured as well as some lesser know concertos and other works
http://www.warnerclassics.com/release.php?release=4683

No 20 is the Best of Andreas Scholl from Decca Music. Andreas Scholl is a counter-tenor, a high-voiced male singer, and the CD is I think entirely Baroque music, a mix of traditional songs, sacred music and opera arias. This was eleased last September.
http://decca.ddd.de/

John W

I'm not proud of it, it's not mine.

I'm just communicating the information to the group. I'm sure you said nobody cared, yet 150 people have viewed the thread, surely to read the chart and not your negative bile.

John W

My understanding - from an interview with a composer whose name I forget unfortunately - is that is *exactly* what happens when a pop star composes classical music.  He hums a tune and says something like, "can you expand this a bit?"  Rather like how he would work with a producer in rock/pop music, I'd imagine.

That's how McCartney's early "classical works" were done, but I've heard (hearsay only) that this one was done on a computer.

I don't know why I used that smiley - I wouldn't dream of winking in real life. I just wanted to denote scepticism.

(It's actually Ecce cor meum, I believe...)

There are many kinds of contributions to a work in the 'classical' world that might be enough to earn some sort of a composing credit. If someone has built a musical structure out of melodies given them by another composer then that would certainly be one. If someone has supplied the harmonies to a melody or even just orchestrated the piece then that at the very least earns them an arranger credit, even if they haven't composed or developed any of the melodic line or harmonic material themselves.

Mussorgsky composed all the notes (melody, harmony, counterpoint - every pitch you hear) for Pictures at an Exhibition; even in the piano version it's a very considerable piece of music (I think). But the Ravel orchestral version of the work is still normally credited to Mussorgsky/Ravel (or it should be) - and some dosh goes (or went) to wherever Ravel's royalties go (or went) when it's performed or recorded or broadcast.

The question some have brought up here (and I've no idea what the answer is) has something to do with whether the piece was actually composed by McCartney from beginning to end (which it might well have been) or whether someone worked the piece up on the basis of some tunes given them by McCartney. The latter for me would entitle them to be considered a co-composer. I haven't heard of anyone else being credited as composer or arranger on the work even though it seems likely someone else was involved in that capacity.

I'm not personally interested in hearing the work - there's plenty of other McCartney I would be inclined to investigate first. But those would for me be the issues.